One of the upcoming improvements; hopefully fixes web content based on system architecture.

[Wolfee Yaffle]

For those who haven't read the recent blog post: Upcoming Improvements to Second Life http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Upcoming-Improvements-to-Second-Life/ba-p/2778336 One important thing I noticed is the plan to fix web content. For a long time as a 64bit Linux user, I've had to use Singularity as my viewer of choice (not a bad thing, I actually love it), because up until this year there never was any other 64bit viewer for SL. Singularity was first! :P Now that Firestorm has done it, I'm noticing a new issue crop up around web content in SL. For those of you who can test it to see if it's just me; I encourage you to download and run any flavour of 64bit Ubuntu Linux on a spare computer, log into SL with 64bit Firestorm and then Singularity, and try to play a YouTube video on a prim and compare how each viewer reacts to the Flashplayer YouTube uses. It will most likely work flawlessly for Singularity, but for Firestorm it will most likely show the player but not play the video (infinite loading spinny thing). If this is the case for you, it will confirm it's not just me. Now I'm not saying Firestorm is bad (quite the contrary, I love it). I'm just saying that to me it looks like Singularity found a workaround for a problem involving Flashplayer or 32bit architecture being used on a 64bit system. But there lies the problem. We shouldn't have to rely on a 3rd party viewer to give us access to vanilla SL features. Thus I'm glad web content is being looked at, and I hope this part of it gets fixed. Keep in mind that unlike Windows, 64bit Linux wont just always run 32bit stuff. There has to be system files (libraries) installed to make them work. And sometimes even that doesn't do it. So kudos to LL for noticing web content is broken due to them not updating the in-world browser in ages, and hopefully this gets fixed.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Linux is a fringe OS, and fixes for that I'd guess are not even on LL's radar. I most certainly would not hold my breath for a 64bit version of the viewer from LL.

While I like the idea of actually fixed web content I seriously doubt that it'll work all that well. LL relies on people to install third party libraries to even get most media going. As you know yourself, 32bit media libs on a 64bit system is a huge pain in the hiney.

Oh and there's another 64bit (linux) viewer: Kokua.