Charlotte Wirtanen was chatting with someone and explained they have discontinued development of the Ascent Viewer. The reason given was, “…because of Linden Labs’ plans to effectively kill off the ability for 1x viewers to even connect anymore at some unspecified point in the near future.” Whether that is the official verdict or not is hard to say.

The phrasing of “…Linden Labs’ plans to effectively kill off the ability for 1x viewers to even connect…” seems to suggest that a goal and effort was or is being put into destroying series 1 viewers for some nefarious corporate benefit. That is somewhat like saying Ford is building 2011 models to kill off 2010 models. One can still connect with a series 1 viewer. One can still drive a Model-T Ford too. But try to put air conditioning or air bags in a Model-T.

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Most of us are curious about which viewer is popular and most used. We only know how many people are logging on with a particular viewer when Linden Lab decides to tell us, and that isn’t often. Viewer developers can usually tell us how many downloads have been made. Some that use their own web based splash page can tell us how many unique visitors come to the page. But the information is sketchy at best.

Viewer Interest

This blog has stats and I’ve tried to make the viewer articles easy to find via Google/Yahoo search. The top two viewers bringing visitors to my site are Ascent and Emerald. Interest in Ascent has lead the stats here for weeks. Ascent is 1st, Out of Emerald’s Ashes… 4th, Greenlife Emerald 5th, Phoenix 7th, Greenlife Emerald Breasts 8th, Phoenix 9th, and Emerald 10th.  Continue reading →

Ascent Logo

Update: This article constantly pulls lots of people. I’m not sure why. In February of 2011 the Ascent Viewer’s development was discontinued. I wrote 2 articles about the Ascent Viewer; this review (Sept 11, 2009) and the one about its being discontinued (linked in this paragraph).

The Singularity Viewer is the descendant of the Ascent Viewer. Or in more geeky terms, Singularity is a branch of the Ascent Viewer code. — End update.

Finding a new viewer has become the new quest for many Second Life residents. In general most have made the safe and simple choice and are using the Imprudence Viewer. A number of residents have abandoned Third Party Viewers (TPV). They have started to use the official SL viewers either SLV1 (Second Life Viewer version 1) or SLV2. A few of us are using Second Life Development Viewers (SLDV), which come out daily as part of the Snowstorm team’s work. Others are exploring and testing other viewers. This is about the Ascent Viewer for those exploring TPV’s. Continue reading →