The latest First Look viewer (58537) has been released, and is available for downloading right now. What is currently the First Look viewer will become the official viewer sometime very soon. You owe it to yourself to check it out ASAP, if you haven't already, while there's still a window for more bug finding and fixing.

This branch of the First Look browser contains numerous stability and performance improvements to the new rendering pipeline and caching architecture. Some people report as much as a 200% performance improvement with the First Look viewer. Others report no performance improvement at all. A lot will depend on your hardware and setup.

This one is chock full of bug-fixes -- more than 50 of them in this release -- but not (alas) one for the escape key. If you're used to using it for the chat bar, use SHIFT ESCAPE instead. If you're used to using it for the camera, you'll have to pull down the Tools Menu and select Reset View. There's a couple things supposed to generally improve rendering performance under some circumstances, but frankly, I'm not seeing a whole lot of improvement in my 4.5fps experience right now -- Well, except that it's usable at 4.5fps, much more so than it once was.

The First Look browser is a beta-test browser that runs against the main (agni) grid. If it eats your inventory, your files and your dog, that's at your own risk. You can download the First Look viewer from the usual place. This browser is a foundation to getting Second Life running under Windows Vista. Note: If you run Windows Vista, you may not be able to run Second Life at this time.