NCSA Mosaic for X 0.9 released

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 4 Mar 93 02:09:16 -0800


Beta version 0.9 of NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System, a networked
information systems and World Wide Web browser, is hereby released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.9.tar.Z

This release of NCSA 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).
DEC Ultrix.

Binaries for these platforms are available:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.9

More binaries will be supplied as I am able to find other
Motif-configured platforms to use. (Contributions of working binaries
are welcome.) Documentation is available online, but is temporarily
out of date (I'll probably bring it up to date this weekend). (Does
that look familiar yet???)

Changes since 0.8 include:

o Some multimedia support. Yew asked for it...
o GIF, JPEG, TIFF, audio, AIFF, DVI, MPEG, MIME, XWD,
PostScript automatically recognized.
o Pipe to external viewers (with viewers set via X resource
mechanism).
o Also retrieve images, audio over Gopher.
o But not over HTTP (unless you're running a modified HTTP
server).
o Inlined MIME/multimedia support will be coming down the
road, so this is all just a temporary hack.
o Transparent handling of compressed (.Z) files.
o Hotlist now *always* saved after modification.
o Fixed occasional infinite loop/crash for some 8-bit documents.
o Fixed various parsing bugs associated with using <xmp> instead of
<plaintext> internally.
o Links to specific anchors now work properly.
o Fixed bug with failure in repeated accesses via FTP.
o Fixed bug with spurious ^M's in Gopher anchors.
o Fixed bug opening local file while visiting remote file.
o Fixed display bug with punctuation falling off end of line.
o Fixed problem with BadAlloc crashes on some servers.
o Annotation text features.
o Choice of annotation links in header or footer.
o Automatic (& fast) updating of annotations on every document
view.
o New defaultAuthorName resource to override use of normal
fullname.
o Annotations now always use machine's full name.
o Menubar item 'Delete This Annotation'.
o Audio annotations (SGI only, so far).
o Fixed BadWindow bug for annotation window on DECstations.
o All plaintext files can now be annotated.
o Fixed occasional problem with size of hotlist/history windows.
o Added sample app-defaults files to distribution.
o New resources for multimedia stuff:
o gifViewerCommand (default 'xv')
o jpegViewerCommand (default 'xv')
o tiffViewerCommand (default 'xv')
o audioPlayerCommand (default 'showaudio' from Metamail
distribution)
o aiffPlayerCommand (default 'sfplay' -- SGI specific)
o dviViewerCommand (default 'xdvi')
o mpegViewerCommand (default 'mpeg_play')
o mimeViewerCommand (default 'xterm -e metamail')
o xwdViewerCommand (default 'xwud -in')
o rgbViewerCommand (default 'ipaste' -- SGI specific)
o postscriptViewerCommand
o Deleted annotations now have all corresponding disk files removed.
o Mosaic is smarter about the <plaintext> HTML token at the head of
plaintext files.
o Lots of little cleanups and bug fixes.

We're targeting a 1.0 release around the middle of March, so quick
feedback and bug reports will be GREATLY appreciated.

Finally, thanks *again* to everyone who's been contributing comments
and bug reports -- keep 'em coming!

Cheers,
Marc & Eric

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