On Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, Philip Rosedale, the Lab’s Chief Technology Officer and Syntax Linden, the lead for Project Zero, the viewer-in-a-browser project, provided a special update to members of the Blogger Network on the status on the project, including the news that Firestorm is joining the project with “Firestorm Zero”.
Firestorm Zero
The release version of Firestorm will be available to users as a viewer-in-your-browser offering in collaboration with Linden Lab. All things being equal, it will be launched on Friday, March 14th, 2025, in addition to the current Project Zero offering of the Official viewer (see below for more on this) and has the unofficial title (likely to become official now!) of Firestorm Zero.
Audience
The primary audience for Firestorm Zero is seen as existing and returning users – the majority of whom already use Firestorm, and who might therefore find Firestorm Zero a more attractive option that Project Zero’s Official viewer.
Payment “Passes”
- Unlike Project Zero, Firestorm Zero will be offered on a pay-to-use basis from the outset, in the form of purchasable “passes”.
- Passes will cost L$250 and provide up to 5 hours of use with Firestorm Zero (passes will not apply to the official viewer at this time, which remains free to use.
- Passes will be available through a Dashboard web page “similar to how you purchase Linden Dollars”, once the service has been announced and is live.
- Firestorm Zero passes will not be available via either the Project Zero website or the Firestorm website.
- While the number of passes available at any given time may be limited, once purchased, they guarantee immediate access to Firestorm Zero without any of the waiting experienced with Project Zero.
- With regards to the above, the idea of selling passes for Firestorm Zero is two-fold:
- To test the waters on charging for the streaming service, to see how users respond to it, how they go on to use the service based on the fees charged, etc.
- To offer the service at a price-point potentially in line with the expectation of the actual streaming costs coming down over time to match or come close to the cost of passes.
Additional Firestorm Zero Notes
- The viewer is streamed at 1920×1080 (as with Project Zero).
- Whilst this is the Firestorm viewer, it is being surfaced to users directly by Linden Lab. As such:
- If a user has opted-in to MFA, they will be required to provide a token (again, as per the usual requirements).
- The viewer will be accessible through a Linden Lab web page after a pass has been purchased, not through the Firestorm website nor the current Project Zero web page.
- Once available, issues with Firestorm Zero can be reported through the Feedback Portal dedicated Firestorm Zero category.
Project Zero Update
Note: for a general overview on the Project Zero work, please see: Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab.
General Update Notes
- As noted above, the Official viewer Project Zero option will remain available at no cost at present, through its dedicated website, and with individual sessions still limited to 1 hour.
- Project Zero is currently provisioned out of Amazon’s AWS facilities on the US West Coast. However, Linden Lab is in discussion with AWS about offering Project Zero through UK and European end-points “soon”.
- Work is continuing on the React / HTML updates to the viewer UI within Project Zero, but these are not ready for surfacing just yet.
- IMs within the Zero viewers are now saved – however, local chat sessions cannot, at present, be saved.
- More general work on Chat is being carried out to try to ensure chat messages are properly synched between different modes of access (e.g. between the viewer and SL Mobile).
More On Possible Future Fees
- Currently, Project Zero is costing Linden Lab around US $1.75 per hour per user.
- While there are expectations / confidence that this price will be reduced in the future, it still means LL are running the service at a loss at present.
- Some of the ways these costs are likely to come down involve switching the service away from Windows machines to Linux systems (hence why at the week #10 CCUG meeting, Linux support was described as becoming “more and more of a forefront priority” with “internal dependencies on supporting it”), and in moving away from dedicated per-user hosting for the streaming viewer to more of a “shared tenancy” model.
- It is the expectation of the overall cost eventually coming down to under US $1 an hour which has encouraged the Lab to settle on the idea of selling “passes” in conjunction with Firestorm Zero, as a means to test the water among users.
- In terms of charging for the service in the future in order to cover costs, it was indicated that offers passes as a subscription perk of some kind (e.g. at a reduced fee(?)) might be considered.
New Users
- The Lab has been seeing “hundreds” of new users per day come into to Second Life via the workflow that leads them to running Project Zero and the Official viewer rather than having to download and install the viewer.
- New users have up to four hours for a session when accessing Second Life through the on-boarding process / Project Zero.
- Those entering SL through the workflow / Project Zero who have responded to the Lab’s surveys have done so “very positively”.
- However, it’s not clear how well these users are being retained beyond their first log-in, as this is harder to track, particularly as retention really needs to be measured in terms of multiple months rather than weeks.
- As a broader note on new user on-boarding, LL is looking towards a “simpler” approach to the on-boarding process as a whole, including giving people the option of using Firestorm / Firestorm Zero as a part of the workflow.
General Notes
- It was suggested that as there is no facility to save snapshots to a local disk in either Project Zero or Firestorm Zero, that those taking snapshots on either try the Save to E-mail option on the Snapshot floater (both Zero and Firestorm Zero) or Save to Flickr (Firestorm Zero) and – if post-processing is required, download the image from there.
- Update: the issue of saving Preferences originally mentioned in this article was fixed on March 13th.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Aha, the rumours are now confirmed 😏
Thanks for the update, Inara!
Interesting that so few people knew about the Send-by-Email facility — it was my natural choice when I took my first snapshot. Then again, I remember very vividly when we used the email facility to send pictures to Flickr, to Snapzilla/SLPics, and many other places. I still have the code for an experimental ‘hot-or-not’ kind of website, where residents could submit their pictures by sending them by email — this enabled us to be sure who was submitting the entry (i.e., no residents could submit pictures on behalf of others — LL’s servers wouldn’t be fooled that way — unless, of course, they shared passwords, which would be a serious ToS violation…).
But I guess that these email-to-picture websites went all out of fashion, relying on direct uploads using a HTTP-based API instead…
Anyway, good news overall! I’m particularly interested in understanding why Linux-based virtual machines are supposed to be cheaper than Windows-based ones; I guess that, when Amazon provides those with a Windows licence, they need to charge something extra. Unless there are other reasons?… My reason for asking is simple: sooner or later, my poor 2014 MacBook Pro will become so obsolete that I won’t be able to run anything from Apple on it, to my dismay. It’s the very last model that Apple built with a fantastic Nvidia card, which is what enables me to use any of the SL viewers without glitches or surprises, and with very reasonable performance, considering the age of the machine, and the demands placed upon it. As a result, all the PBR upgrades and such were neatly handled by the Nvidia card — when ‘everybody else’, with far more powerful hardware, was complaining all the time. For years I’ve been on the lowest possible settings — but I never ever had such good-looking graphics and performance as today. Not even in 2014, when the laptop was top-of-the-line, brand new, and surpassed LL’s hardware requirements by far! (and I have pictures from back then to prove it)
That said, of course, Linux has zero problems in supporting the Nvidia card — and probably much better than Apple and its obsolete drivers. Naturally, I’m aware of TPV’s support of Linux, but it would be very nice to have the official viewer, too. In fact, I’ve got an even older Mac (I forget if it’s from 2009 or 2011), purring along happily, running on elementaryOS without flaws, and almost being able to run a pre-compiled version of the Cool VL Viewer. I say ‘almost’ because that Mac has one of the worst ever first generation Intel on-board graphic cards — the one that was unsupported for years because it’s essentially garbage and not a ‘serious’ graphics card, in the sense of what we expect from GPUs today (and what we expected back then from the likes of AMD and Nvidia, of course).
Anyway. The point here is that even ancient, underpowered machines will continue now to be able to launch their favourite viewers via Zero. The prices proposed by the Firestorm team are very reasonable, considering what they’re offering — and even taking into account that this is pure dumping in order to attract new customers, get some economy of scale kicking in, and hopefully bringing the costs down to the price actually being charged. That way, the system could continue to be offered ‘forever’, with no fear of suddenly disappearing (like at least two others did, using similar concepts) and leaving everybody frustrated…
We do live in ever-more-interesting times 😂
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