Bento Now Firestorm Friendly: Top Third Party Viewer Adds Enhanced Avatar Skeleton Technology

Well that escalated quickly:

The demand for a Bento-capable Firestorm Viewer has been overwhelming, to say the least! With over 8,000 people in our preview group running it, is widely regarded as faster by testers and is expected to be a rock-solid update. For those who don’t know about it, Bento is Linden Lab’s latest and greatest improvement to Second Life that enables a whole new realm of possibilities and realism for avatars. Because it adds dozens of new joints to the Second Life avatar skeleton, we can now have ultrarealistic moving tails, ears, wings, fingers, facial expressions and so much more!

This comes less than 10 days after the official viewer added Bento; at which time it was unclear when exactly Firestorm, by far the most popular viewer among SLers, would catch up. But while Bento hasn't driven much interest in the official viewer, clearly the underlying demand was great.

Hopefully this time Firestorm users reward the hardworking, volunteer Firestorm team for integrating this much-wanted technology so fast:

A January fundraiser for the team earned just L$2,087,455, some $8417 in US dollars -- a paltry amount to maintain software used by roughly 400,000 people. How about some nice holiday treats for your hard-working Firestorm team, people?

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Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

Grabbed it. Running it now.

As I noted in the other thread - I really want to use the official viewer, but it crashes on my Macs anytime there are more than a handful of people around, and the built in AO saves me about 2.5mb of script time and lets me change from AO to dances and so on even in no-script areas...

So I ended up on Firestorm.

[Mondy]

Your report makes it sound like LL released a Bento viewer then Firestorm caught up in 10 days.
In reality FS has been testing Bento for a long time, among the Beta team and then the Firestorm preview group.
It was never going to be released before the official viewer but the dev team have always said when it's ready and proven stable, which 1000's of users have found to be the case, then it would be out.