Firestorm Beta

Soooo, here i am, having downloaded the firestorm beta from here. When you do that, you are strongly advised, to have a clean install. That means, all older firestorm alphas and betas shall be removed.
Firestorm is somewhat Phoenix in Viewer 2. Well, not exactly. But that is the closest description to it.
After having downloaded and installed the viewer, one can either run it straight, or adjust the skin, or adjust the skin later, whatever you prefer.
The biggest point of quarrel for many is, according to discussions, the Viewer 2 sidebar. Firestorm payed tribute to those concerns by launching the viewer in its standard setting without the sidebar. However, under "Avatar-Preferences -Skins" one can select, with or without.
And here is now my standard setting with sidebar:

Click to enlarge

In the next picture, we will now take a closer look to some settings on the User Interface (UI).

Click to enlarge

1. The menu "Me" in V2 is now "Avatar" in Firestorm. 
2. The sidebar is optional
3. Almost all can also be obtained via buttons at the bottom
4. Group- and personal IMs are signalized in the lower right corner.
5. The minimap has a nice feature, showing the chatrange via a circle

The beta runs here smoothly so far, only one crash, and i have in graphics almost all enabled, even those switches where the warning says that would be very unstable. Using this viewer is pretty close to V2, except that some menu points are labelled a bit differently (i.e. "Me" to "Avatar").

So, folks, it is time, to say goodbye to V1 Viewers, definitively in the next weeks. Why so?

because mesh will hit the grid, In July and August. A feature that will not be available, according to LL for V1 viewers. And so, rumours say, V1 viewers are going of the grid soon.

Moaning and bitching about how cool V1 viewers are and how bad V2 viewers are, misses the point. The V2 user interface is simply what we will have to deal with in the very near future. And, it is indeed more intuitive.