A more complete list of viewers and capabilities is being assembled by Tillie Ariantho here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlcKaO7Zo-3UdEx3N1NkWFVNd3lDUG4xdUFQQU9XNFE#gid=0

The LL Third Party Viewer Directory is at: http://viewerdirectory.secondlife.com/

The following are my comments on viewers I have tried, glimpsed or been interested by. Caveat, any of them may explode and take all your money but I class that as less likely than with one of the LL official viewers if only because more eyes are watching them. :

Emerald - LL has banned this viewer. Die hards are using the EmeraldChannel debug setting to bypass the ban. This may not be very sensible given the availability of Phoenix and the announced lack of future upgrades for Emerald. http://emerald.modularsystems.sl/

Diamond - An Emerald Fork. Web Browser currently bust. http://sourceforge.net/projects/diamond-viewer/files/

Phoenix - Yet another Emerald Fork and my prefered one. Maybe the most significant. Jessica Lyon has moved here from Emerald and so has LordGregGreg Back (who was behind Emergence) and the ex-Lindens who had committed to working on Emerald, so this is probably the place to be. But see my note about libllkdu.so (llkdu.dll on Windows) below. http://phoenixviewer.com/ JIRA at http://jira.phoenixviewer.com

Charley.levenque's Ascent. Yet another Emerald Fork. Categorize as interesting. The only viewer with a "demolition button" I know of. http://ascent.balseraph.org/ 

Imprudence - Not Emerald derived. http://imprudenceviewer.org/ 

SnowGlobe: Mainly LL with some OS patches slowly added. Better than a boot to the head. http://bit.ly/SNOW-001

SnowStorm Has loads of developers. Might have a future, but LL is still obsessed with the v2 GUI. "As in Oops! T trod in something GUI." If they fix that it may become interesting. Until then, it is merely a variation on the dreaded Obese A.D.H.D. Turkey on Crack Wannabe a Browser Vista of Viewers aka Viewer 2. http://bit.ly/secondlife-vwr

More about SnowStorm - https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnxJWUubGIsodFVTa3NnZHJuamJ6NmNNMDNCbWU5MlE&hl=en#gid=9

The Official Viewer - Obese A.D.H.D. Turkey on Crack Wannabe a Viewer Vista of Browsers aka Viewer 2. Don't bother.

PyOGP - Text only. Good platform for bots? http://bit.ly/PyOGP-001

See Also: The Emerald Saga

libllkdu

Initially I had some trouble as the rendering was *completely* different between Emerald and Phoenix. This meant that Phoenix seemed, as delivered, unuseable for me. The good news is that the fix is trivial (thanks Latif Khalifa). The problem shown below is caused by OpenJPEG and is solved by copying libllkdu.so (llkdu.dll on Windows) from any Linden Viewer's /bin directory into the Phoenix /bin directory and restarting Phoenix. With the fix in place there is no visible difference between Emerald and Phoenix.

Test Images taken at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SmarterSpace/63/140/ 23 and http://slurl.com/secondlife/SmarterEarth/35/137/2897

PhoenixViewer-i686-1.5.0.0_beta1   Phoenix Viewer 1.5.0 (0) Sep  3 2010 16:48:26 (Phoenix Viewer Internal) Release Notes   Built with GCC version 40302   CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         920  @ 2.67GHz Memory: 12100 MB OS Version: Linux 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686.PAE #1 SMP Wed Aug 18 11:32:44 UTC 2010 i686 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 NVIDIA 195.36.31   libcurl Version: libcurl/7.20.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3.3 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.3.0, Runtime: 1.3.0 Audio Driver Version: OpenAL, version 1.1 ALSOFT 1.10.622 / OpenAL Community / OpenAL Soft: PulseAudio Software Qt Webkit Version: 4.5.2	Emerald Viewer 1.23.5 (1635) May 23 2010 01:55:36 (Emerald Viewer Release)   Emerald Viewer 1.23.5 (1635) May 23 2010 01:55:36 (Emerald Viewer Release) Release Notes   Built with GCC version 40302   You are at 233763.4, 262793.0, 2897.0 in SmarterEarth located at sim7900.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.36.139:13001) Second Life Server 1.42.0.208314 Release Notes   CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         920  @ 2.67GHz Memory: 12100 MB OS Version: Linux 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686.PAE #1 SMP Wed Aug 18 11:32:44 UTC 2010 i686 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 NVIDIA 195.36.31   libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3 c-ares/1.4.0 J2C Decoder Version: Emerald Kakadu(v6.3.2) 1.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000 LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.35373 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.18_0000000000) Packets Lost: 458/2121628 (0.0%)