NCSA X Mosaic 0.6 released

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 31 Jan 93 05:01:45 -0800


Shazam and kaboom -- alpha/beta version 0.6 of NCSA's Motif-based
networked information systems and World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is
hereby released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.6.tar.Z

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).

Binaries for these platforms (and DEC Ultrix) are available:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.6

More binaries will be supplied as I am able to find other
Motif-configured platforms to use. (Contributions of working binaries
are welcome.) The 0.6 Sun binary should work on systems running X11R5
(unlike the 0.5 binary); please let me know ASAP if this isn't so.

Changes since 0.5 are:

History window now shows both 'where you've been' and
'where you can go'.
Previously visited nodes are colored differently, a la Midaswww;
this global history is automatically persistent across sessions.
New resources for customization, including:
Show URLs instead of Document Titles.
Customize window per document feature.
Optionally have pointer and focus warp to keyword entry field
when you reach a searchable node.
Optionally turn off global history mechanism.
Specify home document (overridden by WWW_HOME env variable).
Button2 can now activate anchors; forces a new window
to open (as with Window Per Document feature).
Going from a document necessarily wider than the window
(e.g. preformatted text) to a normal document will now
get rid of the horizontal scrollbar and reformat properly.
Scrollbar and document page state is maintained so stepping
through the history list lands you were last in each document.
Addition of Whine option under Help.
Addition of Go To and Go To Local options under Navigate.
Addition of outlet to Ghostview for PostScript documents
(this is a hack but it's a slick demo feature).
<listing> is now recognized.
Tabs now work in preformatted/plaintext regions.
Numeric character references are now handled.
Anchors without href's aren't colored anymore.
Search Keyword field's sensitivity is managed correctly now.
SIGINT now interrupts network connections too
(so you can hit Ctrl-C in shell window at any time).
Memory leak in document reformatting nailed.
Cloning a window is now intelligent and doesn't do a network
reload; also, window size is maintained.
Layout glitches fixed.
Text selection glitches fixed.
Other misc bugfixes and cleanups.
Better help.

Although this is alpha/beta software, I'm looking more for feedback on
design and functionality than bug reports right now -- down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don't take
the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too. New
releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu