The Firestorm team has formally announced the forthcoming blocking of version 4.6.1 of the popular third-party viewer. The move, which is part of Firestorm’s policy of only allowing three active version of their viewer to access Second Life,

The plan is for this block to only affect Second Life, it should not prevent OpenSim users continuing with version 4.6.1 if they so wish. However, at the time this article was written, this was still being tested.

The Firestorm announcement on the blocking reads in full:

In keeping with our three-version rule, we will be applying a block to version 4.6.1 on Friday, February 20th. This block will only apply to logins for Second Life grid; OpenSim grid logins should still work. Versions 4.6.5, 4.6.7 and 4.6.9 will be the only officially supported versions, but we highly encourage all users to be on our latest release of 4.6.9.

Version 4.4.2 is still exempt from the rule due to Mac-specific issues. However, Linden Lab’s statistics from January 21st indicate that there are still around 8,000 people using this ancient, pre-fitted mesh version. Because of the volume of users who cannot see the world properly, it is harder and harder to justify allowing it to remain exempt. We will be blocking it as well before our next release.

If you are using version 4.6.1 please update as soon as possible to avoid problems logging in on the 20th.

Currently, it looks as though the next release for Firestorm should be around the end of March or early April; however, this is not an official date – the viewer is still being worked on. Therefore, eyes should be kept on the Firestorm blog for information on the next release.