It was about ten years ago on Friday February 24 2012 that Linden Lab annoyed a number of fans of Phoenix (the predecessor to Firestorm) and other third-party viewers by announcing changes on their Third-Party Viewer Policy. Before the change, viewers were free to make innovations that allowed different feature from the Linden Viewer, such as Phoenix showing what viewer others were using by displaying the name over their avatar names.
The reason the Lab gave for the change was to protect the residents' "users’ privacy and security." It was also stated elsewhere they thought the users of their viewer were being bullied by some of Phoenix's users, pressured to stop using the Linden Viewer and run Phoenix instead. While some residents thought the Lab was being reasonable, seeing the move as applying standardization, others thought the new rules were out of jealousy for Phoenix being much more popular than the Linden Viewer, and that the move might stiffle third-party viewer development.
Despite the concerns, Phoenix and other third-party viewer teams went with the new regulations. On Tuesday Feb 28 2012, Phoenix's Jessica Lyon would appear in a public meeting to explain what was going on.
While there was much complaining, life, or in this case virtual life, went on. But there would soon be other topics for the residents to discuss.
Bixyl Shuftan
Ha, I remember those days. You'd walk into a gathering and the vast majority of the group would be using Phoenix, with a few using other third party viewers and not many - usually new people - using the Linden viewer.
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