NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 prerelease 8 available

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 7 Nov 93 21:14:34 -0800


Ladies and gentlemen, next to last in the long series of moments we've
all been waiting for...

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

This prerelease should be the final step on the road to 2.0. With
luck, the real 2.0 release will be in a day or two. Please stress the
prerelease out and report any serious problems to us ASAP.

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.

As before, thanks MUCH to all the prerelease testers who have sent in
feedback and bug reports -- your help is 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
may have a few problems and instabilities.

Changes and additions in this prerelease include:

o Renamed executable 'Mosaic' and application class name 'Mosaic'. User
X resources and system app defaults files should be updated as necessary.
o Implemented FORM METHOD="POST" with optional
ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded".
o Implemented TEXTAREA as described in the current (11/2) HTML+ spec.
o Fixed bugs with image caching (particularly with very small image cache
sizes) and multiple open windows.
o Scrolled lists with nothing selected now return nothing.
o Fixed coredump opportunity in GUI part of authentication code (Marc's
fault, not Ari's).
o Fixed glitch with spinning icon and deferred image loading.
o Quotes (") in OPTIONs now work.
o Radio buttons no longer allowed to be "none of many" (document writers
should make one of the buttons checked by default -- if you think you
want to allow "none of many" behavior, just throw in a "none of the
above" radio button).
o Image input elements whose images are deferred no longer have a
hyperlink available in the deferred image icon.
o Fixed glitch with exploding Gopher/FTP icons in some cases.
o Force allowShellResize to false on Mosaic shell windows to avoid some
stupid window manager bugs.
o "I have noticed that Mosaic 2.0pre6 does not properly scroll horizontally
when a preformatted <PRE> declared document is wider than the
window." Also gopher://gopher.ora.com/00/ordering/online.ordering.
Fixed!
o Fixed coredump opportunity when temporary directory (TMPDIR) is
unusable.
o Fixed coredump opportunities when interrupting NNTP connects and
reads and when including inlined images in news articles (yikes).
o Fixed bad PostScript output of documents with titles with embedded
newlines.
o Fixed problems in PostScript code on DEC Alphas (hopefully).
o Fixed another coredump opportunity in GIF reading code.
o Fixed glitch in simplying URLs like 'http://blargh.blah.:8001/'.
o Password entry fields in forms now obey the MAXLENGTH attribute.
o Changed default DEC Ultrix and Alpha audio player to "aplay" (c.f.
AudioFile).
o Tried to make handling of HTTP network writes more elegant, in case
some HTTP0 server really confuses things.
o Additional performance optimizations in HTML widget.
o New colorful spinning globe icon.
o Final interface tweaks, according to the advice of our user interface and
visual design expert.
o Fixed compilation glitches on a couple different platforms.
o A few miscellaneous minor cleanups.

Comments and feedback much appreciated -- however, remember: THIS IS
UNSUPPORTED CODE.

Cheers,
Marc

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