NCSA Mosaic for X 2.1 available

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sat, 11 Dec 93 20:42:36 -0800


NCSA Mosaic for X 2.1 is now available.

...ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic:

o Source in /Mosaic/Mosaic-source.

o Binaries for SunOS 4.1.3, AIX 3.2.4 with X11R5, IRIX 4.x,
DEC Alpha (OSF/1), DEC Ultrix, and HP/UX 9.x (700-series) in
/Mosaic/Mosaic-binaries.

o Source diffs in /Mosaic/Mosaic-source/diffs.

As always, thanks for all the feedback -- 2.1 fixes many user-reported
bugs.

If you have any comments, questions, or problems with Mosaic 2.1,
please send mail to mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Also please drop us a
note if you enjoy using Mosaic or if you are using it in any
interesting projects or applications -- we love to hear from our
users!

Changes from version 2.0 to version 2.1 include:

o Remote control users and script writers take note: control filename
changed from /tmp/xmosaic.pid to /tmp/Mosaic.pid. This
is the final such change, forever.
o Transparent uncompression over HTTP/1.0 is working -- Plexus
3.0i-beta is known to handle the server-side aspects, and the first
release of NCSA httpd after 1.0a5 will. Only content encodings
"x-compress" and "x-gzip" are currently handled.
o Transparent uncompression for local files is now working.
o Mail sending from within Mosaic is redone. Notably:
o mailCommand resource is now totally obsolete.
o sendmailCommand resource is now expected to point to
your system's sendmail binary; default is
/usr/lib/sendmail. Assumption is made that this
program accepts command-line arguments specifying
addresses to which message should be mailed, and accepts other
headers and message text from stdin.
o Mailed messages are now MIME-compliant, including use of
proper content-types.
o Additional header X-URL is used to indicate the URL of a
mailed document to the recipient.
o A BASE directive is added to mailed HTML documents to
allow inlined images and relative hyperlinks to work on the
other end.
o Mosaic 1.2's multiline FTP response fixes (courtesy John
Ockerbloom) merged in, and tweaks made.
o Added support for freeWAIS 0.202's URL type in native WAIS code.
o Added support for "204 NoResponse" responses in HTTP/1.0. When
such a response is received, Mosaic will not go to a new document or
an error message but will completely disregard the results of the
connection.
o Status line now displays "xx of yy bytes" when talking to an HTTP/1.0
server that tells it content-length. (For small transfers this may not
happen, which is to be expected, as header and entire data block
transfer will be very close together.)
o Worked around BadWindow crash under Ultrix with Edit Hotlist
window.
o Worked around BadWindow crash under Ultrix with ISINDEX forms
and text entry areas.
o Glitch with formatting long lines in some cases fixed.
o Fixed rare coredump opportunity in SELECT/OPTION handling.
o Fixed rare uninitialized memory read in widget selection code.
o Fixed another coredump opportunity in inlined image loading.
o Fixed coredump opportunity in client-side authentication code with
long (>48 character) realm names.
o Mosaic no longer tries to pick up final reply from FTP servers, to
thwart those servers that don't seem to be responding to the final reply
read. Also should make FTP performance a little better. This may be
an evil thing to do (since Mosaic may now tear down the socket before
the FTP server has finished writing to it); I'm not sure.
o Rob says: "It appears on first glance that Mosaic 2.0 is ignoring
anchors in redirected URLs." He was right, and it's now fixed.
o Made a few fixes in PostScript printing code: corrected header
generation, and fixed width handling (thanks to Gustaf Neumann).
o Tweaked reloading code to avoid strange error message.
o Mosaic now assumes that text documents beginning with string
"<BASE" or "<base" are HTML -- this makes it easy to use Mosaic
as a metamail viewer for HTML documents mailed from this version
of Mosaic.
o Merged in donated fixes for 6-bit and 16-bit displays. These aren't
guaranteed to work as we have no way to test them.
o Fixed missing closing ADDRESS tag in news articles.
o Fixed condition in WAIS source parser that caused it to lose track of
its state if escapted characters were inside quotes (thanks to Larry
Masinter).
o Fixed FTP code to allow ftp://username:password@host/
URLs (thanks to Larry Masinter).
o This version of Mosaic supports the GIF89 transparent color
extension. You can create GIFs with a transparent background color
with the latest beta of netpbm and its ppmtogif filter (you can
FTP that from ftp.cs.ubc.ca in /ftp/archive/netpbm if
you're desperate).
o Merged in SOCKS modifications from Ying-Da Lee
(ylee@syl.dl.nec.com); for the version of SOCKS needed to compile
with SOCKS support enabled, see here; note that SOCKS and the SOCKS
code now in Mosaic are NOT supported by NCSA.
o Fixed memory problem with trackFullURLs set to false (that
option still doesn't work in all cases, but at least it does something
reasonable now).
o Tweaks for compilation on various platforms.

Cheers,
Marc & Eric

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