Second Life Browser Beta - A New Forward Advancement For Second Life
You know as do all of us bloggers who are influencers in one way or another for Second Life we come across things in our travel. I followed Second Life's official Tumblr page and noticed that they had just released their browser version of Second Life to try. This is still new technology and in development but this might be a game changer for those who don't have strong laptops to run third-party viewers or don't have a whole lot of space on their laptops for one reason or another. I decided to give it a try tonight and here is my experience.
Honestly Not Bad:
To be fair, I was expecting it to be a lot worse than it truly is, with lots of lag and horrible frame rates that would make Second Life pretty much unusable. But honestly, for a browser version the frame rates weren't horrible if you're not used to being close to perfect with a gaming PC. I was getting between 29-52 frames per second in the MadPea sim this evening when I logged in. Because MadPea is where I logged out from last time after my MadPea post.
Mesh Load Times:
The loading times for mesh objects were really quick, it loaded a whole store fully in about 3 minutes maybe a little less. This was shocking to me because there were a lot of scripts and objects in this area. Even when I participated in a MadPea unlimited gaming sim with HUD everything loaded really quickly. This was amazing to see.
Browser Viewer Only Good For 10 Minutes:
Because the browser version is still in its experimental phase you're only allowed to use it for 10 minutes at a time, this I'm assuming is because streaming a virtual platform like this on a browser is I'm sure very costly. Sadly, it's only 10 minutes because I really enjoyed the experience for the 10 minutes I was on it before being kicked out. It's also nice when it comes to my multi-tasking because all I had to do was switch tabs to write this post and go back to the browser viewer. This made things a lot easier than minimizing the actual Firestorm Viewer and making it larger every time I needed to be in the world while typing. I can see this as being a great option for Second Life users as Second Life continues to work on perfecting this. It will never be perfect but this is going to be a great step forward.
The Main Cons I have:
The major problem which somewhat hinders my experience, is I love taking photos from inside of Second Life. To open up certain things like camera controls, people, maps, etc you have to scroll down and then scroll back up. Not everything fits on the screen and this can get a little annoying, especially when a lot of the time you need those tabs accessible while using Second Life. At least for me, this is something I need for a positive experience, scrolling is not ideal. I like everything in one place right in front of me. Attempting to pull of my conversations is a struggle because I don't like keeping the chat box on my screen unless I'm using it to communicate with others.
There's also another odd thing that happened before logging out. I was testing the viewpoints on the camera and for some reason, I no longer had the ability at that point to move my avatar and only move the camera controls which is kind of a weird bug to have. During this time, I went into Mouselook, DO NOT GO INTO MOUSELOOK only if you don't want to crash completely before the 10 minutes are up my CMD command center for my computer came up and the browser viewer went black. Definitely not ideal but this was only when I entered mouselook mode.
In The End:
I can see the browser-based version of Second Life being a huge step forward for this virtual platform/world. As you know virtual worlds like Roblox and IMVU have browser-based versions of their virtual worlds and this is helpful for users who can't download a viewer or want more of an ability to multi-task and not use too many computer resources. I really think that this is going to change the way users interact within Second Life. Overall this was a positive experience. I was expecting some bugs as this is not perfected and is still in beta, but honestly, there weren't as many issues as I thought there would be for something so new for the community to try and experience. As someone who did backend coding at one point, I can easily say that this is on the right track to bringing Second Life up to speed with other virtual worlds that have been browser and mobile-based for some time along with their downloadable viewers. We are coming into a world where technology is advancing now more than ever and this is really exciting to see. I can't wait to see the advancements of the browser platform as 2025 continues forward.
