In what is a rather odd sounding move, Linden Lab have announced that the beta viewer is to be replaced by multiple beta viewers. The idea seems to be akin to how they release new code on the servers where they have a main channel and then other channels such as Le Tigre, Blue Steel and Magnum.
The reason this all sounds a bit odd is that there have long been project viewers for specific projects, so I’m not sure how this is going to drastically change much. In the blog post Linden Lab tell us that the problem with having only one beta channel is:
“In the past, we have used the ‘Second Life Beta Viewer’ channel for this final user validation, but because we had only one Beta channel, some features and fixes have been significantly delayed waiting for their ‘turn’ in the channel. We will now be able to put those Viewers in the regular Release channel to a smaller randomly chosen group, allowing us to test and release new features more quickly.”
Hmm, I’m still struggling to see why this is different from having project viewers, other than the fact that they may get more feedback by getting rid of the main beta viewer and replacing it with multiple ones.
I’m also puzzled about the part about smaller randomly chosen groups, especially when the blog also tells us:
“there will be a web page where users who want to try early versions can find them.”
There already is a web page where users who want to try early versions can find them, it’s the alternate viewers page on the wiki. The only thing I can see here is that it sounds as if some projects have to wait to be incorporated into the beta viewer before making their way into release and that they can be delayed due to how things currently work, but surely there’s a risk that things that are worked on disparately, will actually cause problems with each other when joined, which currently the beta viewer catches before release.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks, when the picture may be a little less blurry.
As far as I can tell this is mostly a process change; projects don’t have to wait their turn to be in beta. Your concern has I think been addressed; when a project leaves beta, those that are still in beta must merge that project into their own betas and test, so they’re joined before release.
Yup reading into this more it looks like the big change is that it allows me more project dvelopment to reach viewers more quickly. As I’ve used project viewers before I didn’t see this as a big change but I can see why this is a step forward.