Since the Firestorm elitists decided to kill off their most popular viewer, Phoenix, in favor of the buggy, crashtastic Firestorm, I've been looking for someone with the necessary programming skills to take the files I managed to save and use them to bring the viewer back in some form. Unfortunately, there have been no takers as of yet.
It's a real shame, because Phoenix has always worked better than Firestorm and always will, mainly because of inherent flaws in the V2-V3 code that V1 never had. The developers managed to fork Henri Beauchamp's mesh coding and incorporate it into Phoenix, and that helped keep the viewer alive far longer than they wanted to. But when Linden Lab announced the move to Server Side Baking, the devs saw their opportunity to finally stop updating Phoenix, and so they did. Far from LL throwing some nonexistent switch to shut down Phoenix and other V1-based viewers, the decision to kill Phoenix was always that of its own development heads.
Now, this isn't to say that Phoenix Viewer can't be resurrected in some form, updated to include SSB and other new "goodies" from LL, such as pathfinding. Nothing is really "impossible". But with no one willing to take on the task of updating the code and releasing it under another name, the chances of a comeback are pretty low. That could mean an uptick in the number of Singularity and Cool VL Viewer users, however, since many SL users prefer viewers that work consistently, use fewer computer resources, and have an easy to understand interface.
So Phoenix Viewer is pretty much dead, and it isn't likely to come back, even under a different name. That's too bad, because its building features were top notch.
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