What is a viewer?
Viewers (or clients) are your means of accessing Second Life, similar to how a browser accesses the internet. Each viewer has its own unique features, advantages and disadvantages. This is a short list of third-party viewers available as alternatives to the default viewer offered on the Second Life website.
Third-party viewers:
Firestorm
https://www.firestormviewer.org
Easily one of the most popular third party viewers, Firestorm viewer is the premier choice for many who fancy themselves as power users for the multitude of tools, skins, and customization options it provides.
Features:
- Numerous skins and UI options
- Legacy SL search + web-based search
- Area object search
Cool VL Viewer
http://sldev.free.fr/
This viewer was created and is maintained by Henri Beauchamp and it puts emphasis on high UI coherency from one version to the other (meaning no bad surprise for "old timers") while staying in sync with Linden Lab's official viewer features, high performances, high stability and reliability, and a high reactivity to new patches and bug fixes provided by the Open Source community. While primarily designed for, and developed under Linux, the Cool VL Viewer is also available for Windows and macOS.
Features:
- Classic V1 UI
- Lua scripting/automation support
- Dual ALM + PBR renderer
- Legacy SL search + web-based search
- Linux ARM64 builds
Black Dragon viewer
https://niranv-sl.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
Black Dragon (FKA Niran's Viewer) is primarily designed to make SL look good. Unique to this Viewer are visual enhancements that effect lighting, shadows, and environmental presets. Additional features such as a built-in avatar poser make this the quintessential viewer for users looking to take photographs. If you plan on showing off the visual capabilities of SL through pictures or video, this is the viewer for you.
Features:
- Avatar poser
- Numerous visual enhancements
Megapahit viewer
https://megapahit.net/
An entrance to virtual empires in only megabytes, created and maintained by Erik Kundiman. Megapahit viewer is a Second Life viewer for metaverse refugees, aiming to provide at least a mostly-vanilla experience of connecting to Second Life for those using less-supported operating systems. They have FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and macOS packages.
(The name can also be pronounced like "megabyte". Just with a 'p'. )
Features:
- Optimized vertex buffer mapping
- Legacy SL search + web-based search
- X86_64 + ARM64 builds for macOS
Kokua viewer
https://kokua.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KKA/overview?mode=global
Kokua provides releases for PC, Mac and Linux with and without Marine Kelley's RLV together with a broad selection of original features and the best from other viewers. Kokua aims to be the viewer of choice for RLV users who want Marine Kelley's original implementation with more bells and whistles than Marine's own viewer.
Features:
- Builds with RLV, no RLV, and Full-time RLV
- Legacy SL search + web-based search
Alchemy Viewer
https://www.alchemyviewer.org/
Alchemy is a Second Life™ and OpenMetaverse compatible viewer striving to be at the forefront of stability, performance, and technological advancement in the open-source metaverse viewer field.
Features:
- Poser from Black Dragon viewer
- Legacy SL search + web-based search