NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 prerelease 6 available

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 93 06:10:55 -0700
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9310201310.AA03127@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: mosaicdev@ncsa.uiuc.edu, pubs@ncsa.uiuc.edu, likkai@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 prerelease 6 available

Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for...

......ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic/prerelease.  Source, plus binaries
for Sun, IBM, SGI.

This prerelease is another step on the road to 2.0.

There are no known crash conditions, other than a few obscure
system-related problems (e.g. crash in XtKeysymToKeycodeList) that we
can't find ways to work around.  If this prerelease crashes on you for
any reason, please report the crash with a full dbx stack traceback.

There are no known hang conditions, except for one obscure problem
we're having with certain files on certain FTP servers (well, only
uxc.cso.uiuc.edu, as far as we know).  Apparently the expected final
response from the FTP server during a file retrieval transaction isn't
being sent in some cases, causing Mosaic to hang in a network read.
It's unclear whose fault this is, but the problem will probably go
away one way or the other since we'll be doing interruptable read()'s
by 2.0.  Suggestions are welcome... 

Finally, transparent uncompression still doesn't work.  Sorry :-).

If you make this prerelease available to normal users, please make
sure they understand that it is not a full, stable release and that it
is bound to have problems and instabilities that will be fixed by the
time 2.0 is really released.

Changes and additions in this prerelease include:

 o Added CERN authentication code with GUI support (see CERN docs and 
   testcases). 
 o Added/revised scrolled lists, option menus, multiline text areas support in
   fill-out forms; see docs. 
 o Added local directory icons and enhanced FTP icons (thanks to Charles
   Henrich). 
 o New toggle button for selecting delayed image loading on the fly. 
 o New "Load Images In Current" menu option to load all (delayed) images
   in current document. 
 o Improved handling of wide range of HTTP/1.0 response codes (see BSDI
   testcases). 
 o Fixed really stupid problem with networking -- numeric addresses were
   being handled incorrectly. 
 o Fixed coredump when reloading initial document that had been interrupted
   first time it was being loaded; also added internal fixes to make doing
   things with no document loaded at least not crash the program. 
 o Fixed bug when retrieving ftp://mailbase.ac.uk/pub/lists-k-o/nir (it's not
   accessible but a spurious bug report was getting dumped to stderr). 
 o Made FTP directory handling more flexible/accurate (testcase here --
   should see "lists" directory). 
 o Handle HTTP0/HTTP1 socket-level protocol clash a little better (e.g. 
   http://sunsite.unc.edu:8988/expo/nobeamup_map.html?49,51 -- might not
   be a valid testcase anymore). 
 o Binary transfer bug fixed -- it works right now. 
 o Transparent uncompression still doesn't work (sorry), but the mutant
   compressed filename munging code that was alive in pre5 is disabled now,
   and compressed files are treated as binary. 
 o Worked around strange Motif bug causing crashes on some platforms with
   message about accelerators. 
 o Now properly recognize comments ('#' first character in line) in extension
   maps. 
 o Fixed problem with encoding of 8-bit characters in fill-out forms and
   elsewhere. 
 o Made MIME type handling case insensitive in HTTP and WAIS code. 
 o Enhanced URL canonicalization (safe handling of trailing period in fully
   qualified hostnames, plus lowercasing of all hostnames). 
 o Cleaned up some big direct WAIS and other memory leaks. 
 o Improved handling of Gopher errors. 
 o Improved handling of binary transfer mode (now "Load To Local Disk")
   -- local tmp file properly removed when cancel button is hit, and dialog
   box is now modal to prevent problems. 
 o Fixed bug in delayed inlined image icon handling with multiple delayed
   inlined images on the same line. 
 o Gopher/FTP icons are now part of anchors, so they can be clicked on (even
   though they're normal color -- trust us on this one). 
 o Fixed memory corruption problem with remote control newwin
   directive. 
 o Changed FTP client code to always pass fully qualified machine name in
   anonymous password whenever possible (actual username is already being
   passed). 
 o Cleaned up menubar. 
 o Lots of little cleanups, performance tweaks, and portability fixes. 

Comments and feedback much appreciated -- however, beware: THIS IS
UNSUPPORTED CODE.  If you want stability, get Mosaic 1.2
(ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, /Mosaic/xmosaic-binaries and
/Mosaic/xmosaic-source).

Cheers,
Marc & Eric

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