Second Life Viewer 2026.01 — Legacy Search & Stability
The Second Life Viewer 2026.01 release focuses on stability, usability, and a few very welcome quality-of-life updates. The headline change is the return of Legacy Search, (found in the World menu) alongside improvements to camera controls, snapshots, gestures, and a wide range of crash and reliability fixes across inventory, rendering, uploads, and voice.
As usual, this release also includes a substantial amount of behind-the-scenes work aimed at making the viewer feel smoother and more resilient in everyday use.
New features
Legacy Search has returned, It is not the default search and can be found in the World menu, restoring the classic search experience many residents rely on.
Added the ability to hide transparent reflection probes, with a new menu option and a default shortcut: Alt + Shift + T.
The Resident Chooser now supports searching by Agent ID, improving support and administrative workflows.
Quality-of-life improvements
The Gestures window now includes a sortable “Status” column, making it easier to see which gestures are active at a glance.
Snapshot to Inventory adds 1024×1024 as a selectable resolution.
Camera controls received multiple improvements, including better aspect-ratio handling and a shortcut for panning the camera downward.
Improved outfit list performance, especially for larger wardrobes.
Better handling of external editors, with improved fallback to the operating system’s default app when no editor is configured.
Restored support for avatar cloth.
Bug fixes and stability improvements
This release includes a broad set of fixes across the viewer:
Inventory and UI
Fixed a long-standing issue that could cause the viewer to freeze while fetching inventory.
Resolved multiple issues related to Copy SLURL, including obsolete link formats and Favorites bar behavior.
Fixed cases where @mentions could appear twice when using certain characters.
Corrected the “Don’t show me in search” option so its visual state updates properly.
Fixed an issue where the cache could be cleared on every launch if the cache location was invalid.
Graphics and rendering
Multiple crash fixes in rendering, texture handling, and LOD-related code paths.
Fixed crashes related to shader setup and attachment edge cases.
Improvements to GPU benchmarking, including better defaults on Apple Silicon systems.
Uploads
Several fixes for glTF uploads, including crash fixes and issues selecting textures during upload.
Voice (WebRTC)
Fixed crashes during WebRTC initialization.
Improvements to voice reconnection behavior after disconnects.
Adjustments to device-switching logic to prevent instability.
Watchdog
The Watchdog system has been re-enabled and improved, with better feedback, broader thread coverage, and reduced false positives.
Try it out and tell us what you think
The Second Life Viewer 2026.01 is now available to download from the official Second Life website. As always, we encourage you to try it out and let us know how it performs in your day-to-day use.
If you run into issues, please file bugs via Canny (Feedback) so they can be tracked and investigated by the team. Your reports directly help shape future releases.
Thanks for helping us make the Second Life Viewer better — and we’ll see you in the next release 👋