Viewer Types

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Important Note: All Viewers released to Residents whether Alpha, Beta, RC, or Official, will connect to the main, LIVE Second Life Grid. If you elect to use any of them, please be aware that all user information, L$, content, land and other transactions are REAL.

Official Second Life Viewer

An Official Second Life Viewer is the final release of a viewer. Once released, the Official Second Life Viewer becomes the default download for all new Residents. This is the most thoroughly tested viewer available at any given time.

Release Candidate

A Release Candidate or RC viewer is one built from a closely controlled code line. Only a viewer believed to be very close to the quality desired in an Official Second Life Viewer will be released as a Release Candidate. These builds are recommended for all Residents.

Beta

A Beta viewer, which may still contain obvious bugs, is built from code that has been moved from rapidly changing development branches into code lines under a greater level of oversight and control. A Beta viewer has fixes not yet available in the official viewer, and may also have new features.

Project

A Project viewer is an early release from a viewer development team to provide a preview of one or more new features. At any given time, there may be more than one Project viewer available from different development teams. Most project viewer releases will be announced on the Technology Blog Channel, and are the first opportunity to try new features and provide feedback to developers. Some of these viewers will default to connecting to test grids rather than the main Second Life grid (see specifics in the announcement of each Project viewer).

Development

Approximately every two weeks, the Snowstorm Project publishes a Development build; these builds are the latest collection of features under development for the next Beta release, but have not yet been through comprehensive testing so some bugs (possibly including ones that will result in inventory loss or other serious errors) may not yet have been detected and corrected.

Residents who wish to experiment with new features, actively log and comment on issues in the issue tracking system, and work with Linden Lab and open source developers to detect bugs and refine features are encouraged to try these builds.

Alpha or Nightly

An Alpha or Nightly is a Development viewer built from the continuous integration system. New versions may be posted up to several times per day.

Battery Street Irregulars

The Battery Street Irregulars (BSI) program was a program that previously provided restricted access to a small set of dedicated residents to do testing on viewers under development. With the advent of Project and Development viewers, this opportunity is now open to all residents.