Bugs, Requested Features, and Technical Issues

Last update: January 27, 1994

Bug reports should be accompanied by your machine configuration, description of the problem, and instructions for reproducing the problem. If you are using "Mail to developers" menu option for bug reports, in order for us to respond to your message you need to set your email address in "Preferences". You can also email us directly at mosaic-mac@ncsa.uiuc.edu

MacMosaic is quite stable now, but it is always a good idea to run MacsBug and ZapTCP to protect your machine. Both of these are available from Apple. Bug reports have been plentiful. Please consult the bug list below before mailing developers. The response to your question might take a few weeks. We try to process the bugs that are fatal as quickly as we can. If you know of such reproducible bug, please put "CRASH" somewhere in your subject line.

System setup bugs

Most common error is bad MacTCP setup. If you are unable to reach any outside hosts, this should be the first thing to check. Ask your system administrator to help you. Or, you can try to diagnose the problem yourself with a handy tool, MacTCPWatcher.
MacMosaic is incompatible with "Cursor Animator" init, but it might work sometimes?
If proper external viewers are not installed (JPEGView, Sound Machine) and you download a file that is to be viewed in the external viewer, you will get a message specifying what viewer cannot be found.
Mosaic requires MacTCP 2.0.2 or above to run properly. It is possible to use MacMosaic with earlier MacTCP versions, but 12K of memory will be lost with every load. This will cause it to run out of memory quickly, and you will either crash, or get a low-memory message. The reasons why MacMosaic requires MacTCP 2.0.2 are listed below under "Technical Issues".

MacTCP 2.0.2 is available from Apple as TCP/IP Connection
Price (over the counter): $59.00  (single user)  #D1785
                          $128.00 (for 20-user site license) #D1786
Order through Apple catalogue sales:  1-800-795-1000

The cheapest way to get MacTCP that we know of is to buy Adam Engst's book, "The Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh". It costs about $30, and includes MacTCP2.0.2. Latest version of MacTCP is 2.04. The updater from MacTCP2.02 to 2.04 is available from an excellent 'tidbits' archive.

Comprehensive bug list

Interrupting loading can cause MacMosaic to hang for about a minute. Mosaic will recover.
Sometimes, Mosaic will not find an external viewer. This will never occur if the viewer is running, so you can work around this problem.
Launching Mosaic with Preference file causes a crash.
Formatting bugs:
- <P> tag might result in too much spacing. Use <BR> instead.
- Definition lists (<DL>) are not formatted properly.
Styles dialog box might not display all fonts if you are using ATM. It will not allow you to set arbitrary font size.
Documents returned by certain HTTP0.9 servers will be truncated. This is a bug that cannot be fixed with MacTCP, because the error condition that causes truncation is not detected. Most famous example of the bug is http://slacvm.slac.stanford.edu./FIND/spires. Hopefully, servers will be upgraded. Workaround is to use HTTP 0.9 mode from the "Options" menu.
QuickTime movies might load only halfway, and then drop the connection, resulting in the unreadable file (that has taken a very long time to come over, sorry).
Saving document as HTML does not work right for lists.
Incompatibility with A/UX. Possible cause: compilation with MacTCP2.0 headers.

Requested features

We get many feature requests. These features are being considered for the future releases:

Variations of customizable hotlists.
AppleScript.
Local file load without copying.
Return key starts search.

Technical Q&A

What is the relationship between Mosaic for X and MacMosaic? When will you implement forms?

We have started working on forms. This alpha release should be available sometime in April.

Why does MacMosaic require MacTCP 2.0.X?

Because the DNR in the old MacTCP had various memory problems. With applications that did not need to resolve too many host names, the work around was to cache them locally. Since MacMosaic needs to resolve many different names, this work around was not applicable.

Why can't I quit in the middle of loading?

Because we are using a library that makes this very tricky. Right now, the library does background processing from the spin routine. I am amazed that this is working. Quitting in the middle of the load would result in a System Error.

Why doesn't the download count display the size of the file being transferred?

Mosaic does not know the size of the file it is getting off the network. It just reads the file from the network until it hits end-of-file. So, it can't display what it does not know.