#slbrowser

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: