Times are a'changing in the world of SL viewers. Many people are searching for a new viewer, desperately trying various ones before throwing their hands up into the air and blaming Linden Lab for everything. Quite a few folks have written guides to help those displaced residents find a new viewer. Hey, I even started one, but then I got bored. So I figured instead of a giant viewer vs viewer post I'd mention something most folks seem to forget: Linden Lab had made and currently supports more than one viewer.

You might be staring slack-jawed wondering why I'm recommending something from Linden Lab. So I'll enumerate my reasons briefly and then expand on them a bit later.

1. Linden Lab makes Second Life.

No really. That's about it.

The Goods

Of course, you can get Viewer 2. That one's easy: get.secondlife.com.

Linden Lab still supports Viewer 1.x as well, at least for now. If you want any older official release just go to the old versions page on the wiki. One caveat, though, is that older releases may have security flaws and issues connecting to the grid. Also (imho) the official Viewer 1.x is just about the worst option out there for viewers nowadays.

The reason why it sucks is Snowglobe. Amongst other things, Snowglobe made it easier to submit, commit, and test patches that might eventually end up in the core viewer. So Snowglobe viewers have everything the regular viewers have plus a few extra features that havent't been as thoroughly tested.

Snowglobe is available in both 1.x and 2.x flavors, and still seems to be going under active development (albeit at a somewhat slower pace than last year).

It's worth noting that the Lab recently announced Project Snowstorm. Snowstorm seems to be very much like a Snowglobe 2.0, for Viewer 2.x, taking the best parts of the Snowglobe project and reworking the bits that didn't work. There's already been dev builds released from Snowstorm but I haven't tried them since they are dev/alpha builds.

The Pros

Snowglobe rezzes faster. This probably has to do with getting textures using http, but I'm not sure. Before Viewer 2, Snowglobe 1.x was my preferred viewer purely for its speed. The extra features were just icing on the cake.

Linden Lab open-sourced their viewer code. This allowed people to improve and extend the viewer. In fact, a good number of JIRA tickets were closed thanks to contributions from residents based on that open code. Despite that, most of the code in both the official viewers and thirty party viewers (based on the opensourced viewer code) was written by a Linden. So it has to be a pretty good base.

Related to that, Linden Lab doesn't have the resources to code check every line in a third party viewer. The Viewer Directory is "self-certified", meaning the developers are attesting that their viewer is TOS/TPV compliant. The onus of determining each viewer's safety is on the resident, not Linden Lab. You can download hundreds of applications (legally and illegally) from the internet, and just about every one of those apps could potentially contain viruses, trojans, spyware, etc. Even if you have the latest antivirus definitions and malware detection, would those tools be able to tell the difference between an encrypted packet being sent to Linden Lab and an encrypted packet going some shady developer's server?

I'm not trying to spread FUD about third party viewers -- they just require a bit more research to make sure they are safe. Regardless of your operating system, you as the user are the first line of defense for your computer. Assuming you trust Linden Lab (because you want to be on their grid), they're probably the safest place to get a Second Life viewer. For lack of a better analogy coming to mind, using an LL viewer is kinda like abstinence instead of using a contraceptive.

The Cons

The older official viewer is, as mentioned above, probably the lamest viewer around -- third party viewers included. That's because its sort of the "lowest common denominator" for all viewers. Every other viewer has its features and it has nothing on them. That's why you'll probably want to pick one of the other options from the Lab.

In general, though, viewers from Linden Lab are designed for the widest user base, leading to fewer optimizations. For example, the viewer is able to run on Pentium III processors, so it is not compiled with SSE2 support (which would make 3D computations marginally faster). Most of these kinds of computational advantages are barely noticeable in day to day usage, though, so I don't consider that a very large con.

What few optimizations are in place lead to "exclusion" of a section of the market. The best example I can think of is the way Second Life has favored NVIDIA graphics cards over ATI graphics cards. I don't know if Linden Lab actually had some sort of exclusion agreement in place with NVIDIA, but at the end of the day their favoring NVIDIA often leaves ATI users feeling left out and frustrated by the official viewers, especially since ATI has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity these last few years.

The fault, however, is not completely Linden Lab's. Linden Lab relies on OpenGL, a cross-language, cross-platform API for computer graphics. ATI didn't implement OpenGL very well in the past, so it made sense to optimize for NVIDIA. Now that ATI has (to some extent) caught up, it would probably be nice to see feature parity between the two vendors. Maybe that's why shadows are still in alpha?

The biggest con, however, is that development of the official viewer is a slow moving beast. The Lab's QA cycle is long, and new features and improvements take a while to roll out. That's where I see Snowglobe/storm stepping in to pick up the pace.

In the End

I use Viewer 2.1 as my main viewer. It works well enough for my needs on my two computers. Both of my machines were purchased with Second Life in mind, so I did my best to make sure I had hardware that worked. For me, that meant getting mid to high end NVIDIA graphics cards (8600M GT & GTX 260) and having at least 4GB of system RAM. I generally run Medium graphics on my laptop and Ultra on my desktop. Thus far, I haven't crashed very often (maybe once or twice a month?)

Once Snowstorm brings Snowglobe 2.x up to parity with Viewer 2.1 and Snowglobe 1.4, I 'll probably switch to that. Linden Lab has made it clear the future is Viewer 2.x and to be honest, I kinda like the interface.

If I ever need a version 1.x Viewer, I go back to Snowglobe. Sure, I may be missing a few fancy bells and whistles from third party viewers, but I almost never need them so I didn't mind. When I do, I use the viewer with the feature I need.

As always, your mileage may vary. Just don't discount any viewers on account of their coming from the Lab.