Making the switch to Phoenix Firestorm for Second Life

Third party viewers for second life have been around for a long time now, but I've never thought of trying one out. I'm not fond of installing stuff unless I need to. Well the need arose - SL just doesn't work as well on my old laptop as my desktop and I tend to use the laptop more for SL now. One real bugbear was that I wasn't able to see water textures properly, no matter what I changed my settings in Preferences to. I'd read about Firestorm here and there on the web and the SL Forums, and always heard that it was often  preferred viewer for those interested in photography and arts in SL.



So I took the plunge...and I'm thrilled with it. Water renders as it should, it's actually less laggy for me and the environment effects you can set and change are beautiful. There is a great choice of premade sky settings which are absolutely stunning and great for photographs or getting the right atmosphere for your build. Here are a couple of example screenshot taken straight from Second Life. There are loads of presets to choose from or you can totally customize the sky settings, including the clouds.

It's encouraged me to try taking more photographs in SL (will post some soon).
I also like the fact that the GUI looks like it did in the early versions of the SL Viewer (I never really liked the updated one).  For example the search window: I find the listings easier to go through, and I'm sure there are more listings returned:

Other things like the camera control are better - the SL one is just too large for my liking.

The good thing about third party viewers is that you can (I believe) have them installed as well as the SL Viewer, so you can switch between them as necessary. Firestorm for me certainly works fine. Wish I had discovered it years ago!