Q Linden announced the new version of Viewer 2.5 on the Official Second Life Blog yesterday afternoon (SLT), which comes with the new web-based profiles. I downloaded and installed the new version from the Viewer 2.5 release notes page from the SL wiki to view the recent changes. I noticed that Viewer 2.5 on my PC was faster in performance which is way better than previous versions of Viewer 2.
New Profiles
I still much prefer to see profiles in-world (sidebar) instead of opening up a web browser or tab to view them each time. It would be good to have a choice between them. The new privacy settings make sense for how public SL profiles are seen and there is definitely room for improvements and changes for web-based SL profiles like including Plurk in social networking options. There is still alot of mixed reactions to the new SL profiles on the web and it’s going to be interesting to see what Linden Lab does with web based profiles during 2011.
Landmark Favorites
I think this is a great feature that Linden Lab has introduced with Viewer 2.5 to access landmarks from the login screen to favourite places in-world. It would be nice to view existing favourite LMs from one’s inventory too.
History Timeline of Viewer 2 Versions
- Launch of Viewer 2 Beta – 23rd February 2010 (Viewer 2 1st year anniversary coming up soon)
- Viewer 2.0.1 Beta 1 – 15th April 2010
- Viewer 2.1 Alpha – 10th June 2010
- Viewer 2.2 Beta – 23rd September 2010
- Viewer 2.3 Beta – 27th October 2010
- Viewer 2.4 Beta – 3rd December 2010
- Viewer 2.5 Beta – 19th January 2011
What do you think of Viewer 2.5 release ?
Daniel Voyager 
I’ve been using the 2.5 beta since it came out and really like it – faster, more stable and the web-profiles are a really nice feature (I doubted they’d work when I first read about them, but really, they are great).
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Landmark favourites doesn’t work for me. #fail
Opening profile windows gives me 90% of the time first my own profile. Have to try again to see the right. #fail
Web based profiles s****.. erm.. are not good at all.
– loading time is a joke.
– great inconcistensy with sidebar!!!
When changing picks, groups, you are lead to the sidebar again.
– you only see 3 groups and picks on first sight, even when you click more you don’t see the description
2 good things:
– can see profile pics in bigger size
– can open more than 1 profile
And you get this from an early adopter and nearly “fan” of viewer 2.
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@HBA: Viewer 2.5 for me is a great improvement where the previous versions failed to run probably on my pc. That’s good to hear and thanks for your comment. 🙂
@Suzan: Oh right, I’ve been using Viewer 2 since last February among other viewers. Phoenix/Firestorm Viewers seem to be hot favourites with the community at the moment.
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Oh cool! We’ll have more login choices than just our home and our last location! This is a great improvement. Sure, I sometimes typed in a region, but I’d never bother with any coordinances.
My home is a low-prim skybox to minimize the time I have to wait before choosing where I REALLY wanted to go.
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I really love how many bugs they have fixed but the web profiles ARE a bug, they don’t always open and they load painfully slow, I have a fast internet connection and I usually rezz what you need to explore a sim in less than 10 seconds and profiles take 10-25 seconds to load, that is unacceptable compared to the UI profiles
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