Viewer comparison chart?

[Robin23 Dagostino]

I recently learned there are a few other viewers for SL, one called Firestorm and another called Phoenix. I have not been able to find something that compares them -feature and performance wise- to the official SL viewer.

I am having a lot of problems with the official viewer, it crashes constantly and I would like to explore other possibilities to make exploring SL more pleasurable.

[Innula Zenovka]

If it's a chart you want, there's a google spreadsheet but it's not enormously helpful, in that it's for open metaverse, so it includes viewers that certainly aren't approved for SL and it doesn't go into a great deal of detail. 

I would recommend checking out Inara Pey's reviews and weekly round-ups and also the Alternative Viewers forum at SLU.

[Charolotte Caxton]

I used to use the official viewer but then it became super crashy. I now use Exodus and I love it.

http://exodusviewer.com

There is also a Third Party Directory listed in crashiness order.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory

[Robin23 Dagostino]

The comparison spreadsheet was good though not up to date. I didn't know there were so many alternative viewers out there. Only new of Phoenix & Firestorm but it is confusing because both are from the same website (phoenixviewer.com) and that website looks so horrible and without screenshots that makes you doubt whether their viewer is good or just as horrendous as their choice of website.

My SL viewer has become too crashy too, don't know how many times in the day I have to start again.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

You may find https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory useful as well.

[Robin23 Dagostino]

For what I see all of the viewers are based on the same code with some extra features, at least that is what I gather from the Excel sheet and seeing a friend of mine using Exodus. If they have the same code base I don't expect much improvement on stability

[Rin Tae]

All the viewers use the code provided by LL and add their own features and fixes to them. They change the UI layout and move some settings to the surface that are hidden in the official viewer. Some change a lot like the very detailed grafics setting possibilities on Nirans viewer or the look of a version 1 type viewer on the version 3 type viewer based Cool viewer.

The currently most widely used viewer seem to be Firestorm (the numbers are secret but a while ago a linden indeed confirmed it as far as I remember) - I guess a lot of the why it is the most used one currently might have to do with their awsome support. I use it too and I like it but viewer performence is something that is very very individual and depend  lot on the computer, the internet connection and even the way one use the viewer they have chosen.

So you might need to try a few out to find the one that suits you best.

 

And if you do and instal several then make sure to keep their cache separeted ;P ... otherwise they might mix each other up

[Nala Spires]

singularity viewer is a good one also and the first v1.xx type viewer that supports muti clothing layer !

[Nalates Urriah]

One of my friends made a chat for Second Life Viewers. See: https://sites.google.com/site/lakebottomlab/home/httpsdocsgooglecomspreadsheetpubhlen_ushlen_uskey0aqlm_uw5nfqidgxmu3z5tjdkwhp6cmfnz0zoml8wyleoutputhtml

I think it is  more work than he expected. So, it is getting out of date.

The viewers have over 3,000 controls and probably a 1,000 features. A viewer comparision matrix would be enormous.

If your intersted in the history of viewers, visit my blog (link at bottom) and click VIEWERS in the menu. Once up on a time we got new features and significant bug fixes in Third Party Viewers. The Lab lagged advancing the viewer. There was debacle with the Lab's Viewer 2.0. The Lab assigned a new team and way of doing things after that. Since then the Lab's viewer leads in most new code. The last couple of years viewer developers have been catching up with the Linden viewer. It is just now reaching the point that TPV Dev's can get ahead of the Lab.

[Linda Brynner]

I have changed to the latest Singularity viewer too actually It's very smooth and super fast and also less confusing and less buggy than Phoenix and FS.

But like any viewer Singularity isn't flawless. However much better and more stable than Phoenix to my experience and to many others who wave away SL3 and FS.

Although it depends very much on hardware and internet, in general it can be said that viewers 2.8 and higher produce less basis FPS on the same hardware and with the same graphic settings, seeing inworld as a very choppy experience. As said, it depends on hardware and internet, but in general this is an overall complaint by many older users who have known and used the V1 viewers and V2.

The fastest and most stable viewers still seem to be the V1 based, however older 1.23.5 and Snowglobe are very much out of date concerning the many newer featuers introduced in the last years. Phoenix seemed a V1 alternative for me but i've always found it very buggy since i use it in Jan. this year (the know bug with dissapearing objects after going into Appearance) and it crashes for me too often upon entering megaprims with alpha textures. Around mesh it brings my experience to a very low basic FPS.

I am waving away Phoenix and FS, it never did it for me really, but nothing much more better had been around.

Sigularity's developer is more focussing on stability and what others thought was impossible he actually did; combining the V1 look, feel and speed with all latest SL features.

It runs silky smooth and fast. One annoyance i encouter is that '...loading' shows in the Inventory at every object at times after i have uploaded something. A relog seems to resolve it. This is quite annoying, but it's hardly a problem with common play in SL. Singularity crashes every other 2 hours or so in my case, probably still an old memory leak, but it's the same problem i had with 1.23.5.

Sofar i'm happy with Singularity in my case.