NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 prerelease 7 available

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

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Date: Tue, 2 Nov 93 03:28:03 -0800
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9311021128.AA03902@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 7 available

Ladies and gentlemen, another in the long series of moments 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.  With luck, the
real 2.0 release will be next week.

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.

On the upside -- transparent uncompression is back.

BTW, thanks MUCH to all the prerelease testers who have sent in
feedback and bug reports -- your help is (as with 1.x) making 2.0 into
a vastly better product than it could otherwise be.

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 a few problems and instabilities.

Changes and additions in this prerelease include:

 o Smart inlined image caching. Resource imageCacheSize can be
   set to the maximum image cache size of your choice (in kbytes;
   default 2048) -- command line option -ics also does this. 
    o All of the images in a given document will be (temporarily)
      cached while on that page regardless of the value of 
      imageCacheSize. (This is a feature :-). 
    o Cache flushes "least recently viewed". 
 o Added TYPE="image" to forms support (see testcase). 
 o Added interruptible reads. All data loads should now be completely
   interruptible (from end of DNS lookup to beginning of in-widget
   document formatting), except for certain stages of a direct WAIS
   query. 
 o Added "mosaic-internal-present" magic viewer to cause arbitrary
   MIME types to be presented to the user using Mosaic's normal
   plaintext display mechanism. Added many default mappings for
   things like troff and TeX documents to this magic viewer. 
 o Made additional fixes to HTTP code for very small inlined images
   -- testcases here and here. 
 o Transparent uncompression is back (but not recommended, for
   cross-platform compatibility). 
    o X resources uncompressCommand and 
      gunzipCommand still control uncompression commands. 
    o You should upgrade to gzip version 1.2.4 if you're not already
      there, as the new default for X resource gunzipCommand is
      "gunzip -n -f", which requires a recent version of gzip. 
    o Mosaic will not transparently uncompress anything coming
      across a HTTP/1.0 connection, under any circumstances, yet. 
    o Mosaic will not transparently uncompress anything
      transferred in binary transfer mode, but will transparently
      uncompress files typed such that they get saved directly to
      disk (e.g. application/octet-stream, and any
      MIME type mapped to magic viewer
      "mosaic-internal-dump"). 
 o Partially removed smart FTP interface -- will be restored at some
   point in the future when I have more time to work on it. In the
   meantime, it caused too many problems with too many servers. 
 o Added "Reload Images" menu option to explicitly flush images on
   current page and reload the entire thing. 
 o Added horrible hack to allow (slow, but working) transactions with
   way-old HTTP0 servers. 
 o Made handling of screwed-up HTTP/1.0 MIME header sets more
   robust. 
 o Proper password entry dialog for authentication support. 
 o Added last resolved host info caching to help performance with slow,
   confused, or misconfigured DNS servers. 
 o Most temporary files weren't going into specified TMPDIR -- fixed. 
 o Fixed bug in handling of Gopher titles with 8-bit characters (testcase 
   here -- this image). 
 o Fixed bugs in issuing Gopher queries -- punctuation in queries, etc.
   should work now. 
 o Better handling if temporary disk space runs out (still not a good
   thing to allow to happen, though). 
 o Better socket handling (sockets should always be closed by the time
   an external viewer is started now, so they don't leak until the viewer
   exits). 
 o Fixed bug in handling HTTP/1.0 redirection for inlined images and
   reloading. 
 o Fixed bug in following symlinks to absolutely specified files on FTP
   servers. 
 o Fixed minor and intermittent scrollbar management bug. 
 o Fixed another coredump opportunity in GIF reading code. 
 o Fixed another coredump opportunity in FTP icon code (testcase
   file://ftp.uwp.edu/pub/music/lyrics/b/beatles -- can't read it because
   the FTP server is highly nonstandard, but at least now it doesn't dump
   core). 
 o Fixed coredump opportunity in mailcap-parsing code. 
 o Fixed handling of some Gopher directories (e.g. 
   gopher://calypso.oit.unc.edu/11/sunsite.d). 
 o Fixed coredump when using HREF instead of SRC with IMG. 
 o Color stuff -- start at http://nearnet.gnn.com/mkt/mkt.intro.html
   with correct colors and middle-button the resource directory, close
   new window, repeat as necessary, occasionally pressing 'R' (refresh)
   in the original window -- you'll see the colors in the newly opened
   window look incorrect (in 1.2 also). Fixed! 
 o Fixed interruptible I/O weirdness on some System V systems. 
 o Cleaned up generation of Gopher titles. 
 o Changed default player for all audio files from showaudio to sfplay
   for SGIs to avoid various problems. 
 o Problem in SELECT's coming over Gopher -- %0D's at end of lines
   don't get clipped out -- testcase 
   gopher://gopher.saintjoe.edu/0/search/archieplex.html -- fixed. 
 o Fixed glitch with PostScript code. 
 o Made small change to FTP code to cooperate with various FTP
   servers better (testcase here). 
 o Fixed coredump when pressing Reset button in form with password
   entry field. 
 o Fixed socket leaking problems in FTP, WAIS, and beyond -- sockets
   should never again be leaked by Mosaic; if you can confirm this is
   happening, please let us know (and provide evidence, testcase
   sequences, and netstat readouts). 
 o Added recognition of Gopher+ image, sound, and movie types --
   still no guarantee they'll be handled properly, as Gopher+ does typing
   a little differently and we don't provide full support for Gopher+
   anyway. 
 o Fixed problem if temporary local copy of HDF file goes away
   unexpectedly. Also better handling of temporary local files -- 
   however, beware that if you use Mosaic's HDF viewing support, you
   should clean up your temporary directory space on a fairly regular
   basis, as Mosaic does not always know when to clean it up for you
   (for various reasons -- Mosaic should always clean up local copies of
   other types of data files though). 
 o Fixed longstanding security glitch in Gopher support (Marc VH will
   recognize this). 
 o News support tweaked. 
 o More performance enhancements -- go Quantify! 
 o Added some portability fixes. 
 o Lots of little cleanups and 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

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (MIME welcomed here)