Netscape Navigator 1.1 Beta 1 for Windows

Update & Version Information

• This is a beta version of 1.1. The currently released Netscape Navigator version 1.0N will continue to be available on our server until the final release of 1.1.
• Customers who bought 1.0 will be entitled to a free version of 1.1 when it is officially released; these customers will be able to download a 1.1N version and be licensed to use this version.
• Customers will not automatically receive the 1.1 version in the mail. It will be up to the customer to download the new version from our home pages.
• Licensed 1.0 customers will be able to transfer whatever time remains of their 90 days of support to the 1.1 version once it is officially released.

Pricing and Availablity

• We will not be selling version 1.1 until it is officially released. However, if you purchase version 1.0 now you will be entitled to a free update to the final version of 1.1.
• We expect to release version 1.1 under the same terms and pricing as the 1.0 release, including a 1.1N release. The pricing page gives current pricing for all of the released Netscape products.

Netscape's Commitment to Standards

A number of new features were added as part of the version 1.1 product. These were based upon emerging standards and proposals. The new HTML tags are based upon the HTML 3.0 proposal. The HTTP additions are based upon discussions within the working group mailing list and the MIME standard. Netscape Communications Corporation is an active participant in all Web-related standard bodies and is a founding Full Member of the W3 Consortium. Please read our discussion of Netscape's commitment to open standards, if you're interested in more information.

Please be advised, however, that since HTML 3.0 is still an evolving proposal, some of the new tags supported in Netscape 1.1b1 may change before the final Netscape 1.1 release. We will support the syntax that is agreed upon for the final HTML 3.0 specification. This could mean that some of the tags which are supported in the beta will change between now and the final release as the standard evolves.

What's New?

• Bug fixes: Many fixes since 1.0, including view source in external viewers, crashing with some video drivers on wide images, etc.

• Performance: Many operations should be faster. Going back to visited pages is now faster, because we've devoted 2/3 of the memory cache to decoded images.

• Window's 32-Bit Version!: We are now shipping both a 16-bit version and a 32-bit version.

  The 32-bit version will only run on 32-bit platforms (Windows NT).

  The 32-bit version will also run under Windows95. However, the October94 release of Windows95 seems to have a bug in the DDE libraries. If you edit your INI file and add:

      [Main]
      DDE Hosed=yes
  

  DDE will not be used and Netscape should run.

• Tables: These are as defined in the current HTML 3.0 draft specification. For a demonstration of tables, click here.

• Backgrounds: ... and the ability to change text colors -- for a demonstration, click here. Since Netscape 1.1a1, we've changed the HTML for backgrounds. The demonstration pages will show you the new HTML.

• User Defined Backgrounds: You can specify default background colors and images in the Preferences.

• Remote Control Mechanism: You can control Netscape from outside of the application. For more information, read Netscape Client APIs.

• Dynamic Documents: You can create documents whose contents are updated dynamically, either on a periodic basis or irregularly. See here for details.

• Support for <EMBED> tag: You can now embed documents inside an HTML document on the Windows version of Netscape using OLE. For more information, read Embed Tag Demonstration.

• An External Audio Viewer on 16-bit and 32-bit: We now provide an external application to "view" audio files from the network in the Windows versions of Netscape 1.1b1. Read the Netscape Audio Player for more information.

• Popup Menu: A Popup menu with some key commands right at your fingertips. To see the pop-up menu on the Windows or X platform, hold down the right mouse button over the document area. On the Macintosh, hold down your mouse button for about 1 second to make the popup menu appear.

• ALT tags & Loading Images: We now show ALT text in images and allow you to load individual images when Auto Load Images is turned off. To load an image, click on the image replacement icon. To follow the image's link, click on the ALT text, or use the popup menu.

• Mail Sending & News Posting Improvements: A new Mail Message window that also includes News Posting capabilities and file attachments.

• Cache Preferences: There are several Preferences available, now, that refer to the Memory cache and the Disk cache. You can set the size of these caches through the Preferences window. A larger disk cache means that as you browse, files will be saved on your disk so that when you re-visit them, they are brought up from disk rather than from the network.

  In Netscape 1.0, when you asked for a document already in your cache, Netscape would always contact the original document server and ask for the document's header information, for comparison. This affected the performance of the cache. In 1.1, you can control this through the Cache preference: Verify Documents. If you set this to "Every Time", you will have the same behavior as in Netscape 1.0. "Once per session" means that the document is only checked the first time you use it in a particular Netscape session. "Upon Expiration" means that the server is contacted only if the document's header information indicates that it has expired. For the best cache performance, use "Once per session".

• Security: The US version of the software now supports numerous cipher choices: RC4-40, RC4-128, RC2-40, RC2-128, DES-64, and DES-192. The cipher used in any particular document is displayed in the Document Information dialog box. The export version of the software, including version 1.0, supports only RC4-40.

• News Reading Improvements: Improvements to the News interface, including:
  • A new Preference to set the maximum number of articles to download at a time: this will give much better performance over a modem line.
  • New presentation of newsgroups and articles.
  • MIME-compliant news articles will be presented according to their content type. (This means that news articles may contain HTML, or even encoded JPEG or GIF images. Messages of type multipart/mixed are also understood.)
  • Signature files are now supported in mail and in news
  • Subscribing to groups on multiple news hosts is supported.

• Preference window: The preference window has been slightly rearranged.

Initialization File

The self extracting executable file for Netscape contains the initialization file netscape.ini, which has entries for all of the values you can customize for Netscape. Netscape will look in win.ini in the

    [Netscape]
    ini=

section for the location of the INI file. If this does not exist, Netscape will look in the directory where it was run for the INI file.

Surfing the Net in Japanese

• JIS (ISO-2022-JP),
• SJIS (Shift-JIS) and
• EUC-JP (Extended UNIX Code forJapanese)

• Line Wrapping for Japanese Text: Netscape relies upon "white space" to determine where to wrap lines when laying out HTML text files in English (and other alphabetic languages).

  Japanese text does not normally include "white space" (e.g., spaces and tabs), so Netscape 1.1 wraps lines at Japanese character boundaries when laying out HTML text files in Japanese.

• MIME Charset parameter in HTTP: If the MIME charset parameter is included in the HTTP header from the server, Netscape 1.1 parses this parameter to determine the encoding of text file. For example:

          Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
             or
          Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-2022-jp
  

  The charset names recognized by Netscape 1.1 are specified in RFC 1700 (except for the names that begin with "x-"). These include:

  • us-ascii
  • iso-8859-1
  • iso-2022-jp
  • x-sjis
  • x-euc-jp
  • x-mac-roman

  Netscape also supports aliases for us-ascii:
  ansi_x3.4-1968, iso-ir-6, ansi_x3.4-1986, iso_646.irv:1991, ascii, iso646-us, us, ibm367, cp367.

  Netscape also supports aliases for iso_8859-1:
  latin1, iso_8859-1, iso_8859-1:1987, iso-ir-100, l1, ibm819, cp819.

• Preferences: If the MIME charset is not specified in the HTTP headers, then Netscape will determine the character set encoding of the text files from a user selectable preference.

• Document Information: The character set encoding of the current document is included in the "Document Information..." box under the File menu.

• System Requirements: To surf in Japanese on Windows Japanese Windows is required. It may also work on US Windows if third party Japanese enabling software such as Win/V is being used.

  To surf in Japanese on Macintosh, either KanjiTalk7 or Japanese Language Kit (on System 7) is required.

• Additional Information: Additional information and Japanese Web pages will be made available at Netscape. Stay tuned.

Known Problems/Bugs

Options-Menu-Preferences

This current beta release does not remember some of the Preferences' settings from one Netscape session to the other. For example: Netscape picks up the default font size everytime you run it.

Printing & Backgrounds

You cannot print a page that has a background. If you do you may get some text, but mostly blank pages.

Selection

When text is selected and there is a background image, the selected text might not be readable.

Backgrounds and Transparency

In 16 color VGA mode, images with transparent backgrounds do not show properly over other background images. Instead of transparent, the background is opaque, usually black. Performance for transparent images over backgrounds isn't very good.

There is also a known problem with the rendering of transparent images; when a transparent image appears in a page that does not have a backdrop image, the transparent image will occasionally be shown with a "random" color at its background.

Image Display Bugs

Some VGA board video drivers have a bug in them which causes GPFs. Among these drivers are those used with the Cirrus Logic chip set, and ATI boards, to name a few. If you encounter GPFs or program lockups while viewing pages with images on them, try one of the following work-arounds:

• Change the bits per pixel depth from 8 bits, (256 colors), to 16 bits, (35K or 65K colors), or 24 bits, (16 million).
• Change the "Logical DPI" value. This may default to some value e.g., 120, and would therefore be changed to 96. Or, the values may may be named, "Small resources/text" vs. "Large resources/text"

NAPLAYER Audio Player Bugs

The NAPLAYER will report "Sound device not available" in Windows '95, even if you have one available and working.

Ansynchonous DNS

If you think your winsock is not handling Async DNS correctly, try setting the Async option in the Netscape INI file to "no,"

    [Network]
    Use Async DNS=no

The default is to use Async DNS, not using it will result in lower performance and can cause problems when multiple simultaneous connections are attempted. You can also set

    [Network]
    Max Connections=1

which will prevent problems when not using Async DNS but will also result in much slower performance.

PC-NFS from Sun and Spry's newly updated stack are the only winsocks we know of that require setting the "Async DNS" flag to "no".

Dec Alpha problems

We have received reports that Netscape does not work with NT 3.5 on Dec Alpha machines. We are looking into this problem.

Notes, Tips, and Information

But what about the animating N?

We will have a new animation and desktop icon by the time Netscape 1.1 ships. In fact, you might want to participate in the animation contest.

Importing Hotlists as Bookmarks

Netscape has an import command on the Bookmarks window that will read any HTML file containing links and convert those links into bookmarks. If you would like to import your NCSA Hotlist into Netscape, you can use the Mozilize utility to convert your hotlist to a Netscape style bookmark list. This program is unsupported so your results may vary.

Helper Applications

For telnet, ftp, and for displaying audio and video, Netscape uses "Helper Applications". These applications are configured in your Preferences window. For help configuring this window, check out our documentation: Helper Applications

On Windows, LVIEW31.EXE (for JPEG images), MPEGPLAY.EXE (for MPEG movies), and WHAM.EXE (for audio files) are all useful applications. One site where these can be found is ftp://ftp.cica.indiana.edu, but that site is often difficult to reach. You can also try the mirror site on ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/. The files you want are:

Gif/Jpeg:
---------
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/desktop/lview31.zip


MPEG:
-----
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/desktop/mpegv11d.zip
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/desktop/mpegw32g.zip


Video for Windows (AVI)
-----------------------
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/desktop/avipro2.exe


Audio
-----
ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/micro/msdos/win3/sounds/wham131.zip

Why do I have two icons on the desktop?

In order to get Netscape to show up in the task list and get multiple top-level windows at the same time Netscape needs to keep one of its windows iconized at all times. The icon will always be named "Netscape" and will not de-iconize if you click on it. Yup, its still there in 1.1.

How do I use Netscape without a network connection?

If you do not have a network connection but still want to user Netscape to browse local files you should get the file mozock.dll. If you install this file as winsock.dll Netscape will work fine with local file reads. Be sure to shift-click on the above link or else Netscape will treat it as a text document. Doh! If you want to get out to the rest of the net mozock.dll is not for you.