The latest First Look viewer (58716) 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 contains some fixes for the texture bugs in the last release, as well as some additional glitches where textures that didn't remain visible for very long might never actually get fetched. Interestingly, according to the release notes the matching beta-grid release fixes that horror bug we've had lately where people who should have been able to rez objects could not unless object entry for all was enabled.

Steve Linden would also like to hear about anyone's ideas for practically mapping the deprecated particle functions onto the (now standard) llParticleSystem() call. If you can help with this, send him an IM.

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.