GIGAOM
WAGNER JAMES AU
8 APRIL 08
While Second Life is frequently described as a 3D web browser, there’s a chance it may be remembered as the (late and lamented) Netscape Navigator of metaverse browsers.
That thought occurred to me as I was attending the “Open Source Virtual Worlds” panel at last week’s Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York. Like Netscape, Linden Lab last year open-sourced its viewer code, which led to a number of unofficial versions, some of which have been reverse engineered to run on non-Linden servers. And at least one of them already looks significantly better in some respects than Linden’s official viewer.