Welcome to NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows ™

NCSA Mosaic is an Internet navigation and data retrieval tool. It allows you to access network information with the click of a mouse button. Mosaic is capable of accessing data from World Wide Web servers (HTTP), Gopher servers, FTP servers and Usenet News servers (NNTP). Mosaic can also access other data services through gateway servers. These services provide search capabilities in database environments such as PH, Archie, WAIS, and Veronica. NCSA Mosaic provides transparent access to these information sources and services. NCSA Mosaic software is copyright The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (UI), and ownership remains with the UI. The UI grants you a license without a fee to use the Mosaic software for personal, academic, research, government and internal business purposes. For information about licensing or distributing Mosaic see the FAQs at the end of this document.

Mosaic is a Win32 application and is compatible with Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows NT and Windows 95. The Windows NT operating system is available for the following processors:

iX86 - Intel's iX86 Processors and compatibles
aXP - Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) aXP processor
MIPS - Mips Technology processors
PPC - The Motorola PowerPC

NCSA Mosaic Final Beta Release Notes

Table of contents

mosaic.ini Update Information
Win32s Update Information
Features, Enhancements and Bug Fixes


mosaic.ini Update Information

The Mosaic initialization file, mosaic.ini, is completely user configurable from the Options, Preferences... menus.

"Do not edit the mosaic.ini file with an ASCII editor."


Win32s Update Information

Windows NT users and Win95 beta-testers

Windows NT and Win95 users don't need Win32s. The operating systems are 32-bit operating systems with OLE support built-in. Do not install Win32s on WinNT or Win95 systems.

Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups Users

Latest Release: Win32s with OLE, version 1.25

This latest version of Win32s addresses the National Language Support problem and the compobj.dll problem some Windows users were experiencing with Win32s v1.20. We recommend you upgrade to this latest version if you use a language other than English(American) in your Windows environment. We also recommend you upgrade if you have experienced problems with the compobj.dll library while using Microsoft Office, Excel or Word. In general, if you are NOT experiencing problems with Win32s v1.20, upgrading to Win32s v1.25 is not necessary.

Features, Enhancements, and Bug fixes

Features and Enhancements

Dead Bugs


Internal Image Support

Mosaic supports GIF and JPEG image files internally. Use the Viewers Preferences menu to configure Mosaic to display images within the Mosaic windows. Open the viewers preferences menu and scroll to the image/gif MIME type. When image/gif is displayed in the "Associate MIME Type of:" field, enter "internal" in the "To This Application" field. For Example:
Associate MIME Type of:image/gif
Description of MIME Type:Image File Format - GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
With this/these Extension:.gif
To This Application:internal
Make the same change to the image/jpeg MIME type.

Toolbar interface for NEWS

The Mosaic News Toolbar is another interface to the newsgroup tools. The toolbar can be moved to any border on the window or it can stand alone out side of the Mosaic window. To move the toolbar select an area in the toolbar between the buttons, left click and drag the toolbar to the desired location.

A list of tools available from the news toolbar. From left to right:

Previous Article View the previous news article
Next Article View the next news article
Previous Topic View the previous news topic
Next Topic View the next news topic
Post Post an article to the present newsgroup
Follow-upPublically reply to an article in a newsgroup
ReplyPrivately reply to the author of a newsgroup article.
Article List Return to the list of news artilces
Catch up Mark all files a being read.
Next Newsgroup View articles from your next listed newsgroup.
Previous Newsgroup View articles from the previous newsgroup.
New Subscriptions Open the News Subscriptions page to update the current list of newsgroups.


Help

Mosaic supports Windows help. The mosaic.hlp file was installed in the Mosaic directory during Mosaic's installation. You can open the Mosaic help from the Help menu, the question mark on the toolbar or by selecting F1 from the keyboard. Mosaic help is context sensitive and you click on the area where you need help.

New HTML Support

BACKGROUND="mosback2.gif"Defines the path to an image.
BGCOLOR=#C0C0C0Defines the background color
TEXT=#000000Defines the text color
LINK=#0000FFDefines an unvisited link color
VLINK=#FF0000Defines the visited link color
#0000FFDefines the RGB value of a color
# = define, 00 = R, 00 = G, FF = B
For Example#C0C0C0 = Grey
#000000 = Black
#0000FF = Blue
#00FF00 = Green

<A HREF="mailto:jdoe@your.com" TITLE="Mailto from the release notes page">

You can enter a default message title or subject from your mailto references.


New FTP Support

Alt+Enter Opens the Preferences menus
A or a Add to hotlist
End End is mapped to the bottom of the current page.

MD5 Authentication

Mosaic supports HTTPD v1.1 MD5 access authentication.

Sound Scheme Mapping

The Audio preferences menu has an additional feature to allow you to save sound schemes as separate files. The sound scheme files map the current Mosaic features to WAVE audio files and save the associations in a file with the .snd extension. We've had a lot of fun putting together various sound schemes. Check them out.
mosaic-w@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign