Phoenix or Kirstens? Choosing your new viewer

The great offer of viewers, alternative to the official Linden Labs vesion, makes difficult for users to make a choice. This article will try to spot the differences between them and how they're going to evolve in the next future.

A quick recap first.. Once upon a time there was viewer 1.0. It was the only access door to Second Life, and in many cases it revealed itself as an obstacle to those willing to approach the most popular virtual world in the net, because of the long time needed to learn how to use it.
This viewer has been designed in a time people wasn't much aware of the great role interface design could play in a user experience. Focus was mainly on features users were supposed to need. At some point, Linden Labs started Snowglobe project, to allow the development of custom viewers, and people felt encouraged to improve it, adding more and more useful features that helped greatly in improving usability and user experience.
Inside this context many third party viewers were born, and among all Emerald Viewer, an alternative choice that many Second Life users adopted gladly, featuring a radar, a sim scanner, bouncing boobies, rlv and many interface improvements, like vertical chat tabs.


During the first months of 2010, Emerald managed to coexist with the new "official" viewer version, the 2.0, and his experimental version, the Snowstorm project, offering a preview of all the new upcoming features.
Albeit featuring a total interface redesign, more user friendly for the beginners, the new LL Viewer 2.0 lacked all the goodies Emerald was offering, making harder for experienced users to adopt the new interface and give up Emerald.

Kirstens Viewer S20

In this context, KirstenLee Cinquetti, the maintainer of Kirstens Viewer released the S20 version of his Viewer. Coming from a long history, originally based on 1.0, Kirstens Viewer has always been focused on graphical and performance aspects, embedding all the additions that could potentially improve both graphical beauty of images and smoothness of the animations, and committed strictly on the maintainance and bug fixing of the features he added. Having to choose which base to elect to start developing the S20 version, Kirsten opted for the new 2.0, inheriting, among other things, the new redesigned interface.
This lead to a much lower crashy program and a much safer viewer, but at a price of a lower compatibility. In fact Kirstens Viewer requires a dual core CPU and a mid-high end graphic card to run.
The much more loose policies Emerald viewer adopted lead, in the March 2010, to his breakdown. Malicious code was found be active in it, and Linden Labs had to consider the option of banning it, loosing a very high quality audience of users.
Luckily for us,they opted for a more strict Third Party Viewers policy, imposing a much higher traceability and quality assurance of the program (similar to the one adopted by Kirstens), which lead to the actual Phoenix project. Even though its users didn't realize it, a huge forward leap was being made. Still offering the same level of richness and compatibility Emerald had, Phoenix now offers a much safer and stable product.
Meanwhile, Linden Labs tried to address technical issues that plagued SL users since their beginning, developing a completely redesigned server, much faster and reliable but not compatible with old 1.x viewer, still at the base of Phoenix. So far, all of these performance improvements are a benefit only for users of Version 2 Linden Labs viewer and all the third party viewers based on it.
According to some commenters, Lindens will impose a deadline in 2011 for 1.x users to migrate to a 2.x derived viewer.

This lead to Firestorm project, the next descendant of Emerald, a new viewer built on scratch starting from the Snowstorm base, enriched with all the candies Phoenix has and taking advantage of the new policies, granting the same level of safety Phoenix offers today.
One year after Emerald breakdown, users opting for a Third Part Viewer will have the great chance of choosing between Kirstens S21, a viewer with fabulous graphical effect and performance, and Firestorm, promising to be the most functional and stable viewer ever produced.

Downloads:
http://www.kirstensviewer.com/
http://www.phoenixviewer.com/
http://secondlife.com
Inworld support groups:
"The Official Kirstens Viewer Group!" secondlife:///app/group/d6412362-26d9-6c71-4c44-4edcae7d09c9/inspect
"Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group": secondlife:///app/group/7ba4569c-9dd9-fed2-aaa7-36065d18a13c/inspect