NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR 2.0b1 FOR WINDOWS

You are using Netscape 2.0 Beta 1 for Windows. These release notes cover:

• Requirements
• New Features
• Known Problems and Bugs

• If you are running Windows 3.1 or WFW, you must use the 16-bit Navigator even if you have Win32s installed.
• If you are running Windows 95 or Windows NT, use the 32-bit Navigator. (You can also use the 16-bit Navigator, if you wish).
• To run the 32bit Navigator, you MUST have a 32-bit TCP/IP stack. Both Windows 95 and Windows NT provide 32bit TCP/IP stacks that you can setup. If you need help setting up the TCP/IP stack in Windows 95, see http://www.windows95.com.

Java Applets

• Support for Java Applets: Java is currently supported on Solaris, SunOS, Irix, Windows 95 and Windows NT.

  Java support in this release of Netscape Navigator is included primarily for Java developers who wish to do compatibility testing. It is still of pre-beta quality.

  The version of Java supported by Netscape Navigator is compatible with the Pre-Beta 1 Java Developers Kit from Sun Microsystems. Applets written for the Alpha 3 release of the HotJava browser are not compatible with this later version of Java.

  Please see the Known Problems section for Java Problems we already know about.

  Java Info

LiveScript

LiveScript is currently implemented only on Windows. Other platforms will be supported in Beta 2.

LiveScript Documentation is now available.

• Frames -- Multiple documents on one page: Frames are a way of specifying multiple, independent, scrollable regions, or cells, within a display window. Each frame cell can contain a seperate HTML document. Users can scroll and resize frame cells, at the choice of the frame creator. Cells can also be given NAME values, so they can be targetted by links in other documents, such as other cells within the same frame. These features provide a powerful new way of presenting documents.

  Frame Development Information

  Cool Examples of Frames

  I've been framed!

• Targetted Windows: Browser windows can now have names associated with them. Links in any window can refer to another window by name. When you click on the link, the document you asked for will appear in that named window. If the window is not already open, Netscape will open and name a new window for you.

  The syntax for the targetted windows is:

  <A HREF="url.html" TARGET="window_name"> Click here and open a New Window </A>

  A new BASE tag allows you to pick a default named target window for every link in a document that does not have an explicit TARGET attribute. It's format is:

  <BASE TARGET="default_target">

• Client-Side Image Maps: We have implemented the IETF Internet Draft for client-side image maps.

  This is similar to server-side ISMAP images, in that you are presented with an image that you can click on to take you to a number of different sites. However, with server-side image maps, the x,y coordinates of the click are sent to the server, and the server decides which URL you see.

  With client-side image maps, the MAP that relates parts of the image to different URLs is stored in the current file. This saves a round trip to the server, and should present documents to you faster. Since the MAP information is stored in the document you are viewing, the destination URLs can be displayed in the status area as you pass the mouse over the image map.

  Try the client-side image map at the bottom of this page.

• Fast, Progressive JPEG images: Support for progressive JPEG images gives you high quality images that load faster than regular JPEG or GIF images. The progressive loading is smoother than the interlaced GIF loading, so you can identify the image sooner.

  See a demo

• Automatic Dithering: In previous releases, you had to decide between "Dither to Color Cube" and "Use Closest Color in Color Cube". This preference was set for every image on every page.

  Now you can specify "Automatic Dithering" and Netscape will make the decision to dither or not for each image on the page. In general, your images should look better with automatic dithering. The old options are still there, so if you want to set them yourself, you can.

  The default setting is "Automatic Dithering".

• Font Color tag: In addition to specifying font colors for text and links on a whole page, you can use the new COLOR attribute in the FONT tag to choose colors for just part of a page. The syntax for the FONT tag is as follows:

  <FONT COLOR="#FF0000">Red</FONT>

  <FONT COLOR="#00FF00">Green</FONT>

  <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Blue</FONT>

• DIV tag: We support a new HTML 3.0 tag that lets you
  <DIV ALIGN="left">
  Left justify text by putting it
  within the DIV tags.
  </DIV>
  <DIV ALIGN="center">
  Center some text by putting it
  within the DIV tags.
  </DIV>
  <DIV ALIGN="right">
  Right justify some text by putting it
  within the DIV tags.
  </DIV>

• WRAP attribute in the TEXTAREA tag: You can specify how to handle word-wrapping in text input areas in forms.

  <TEXTAREA WRAP=OFF> -- the default setting

  Wrapping doesn't happen. Lines are sent exactly as typed.

  <TEXTAREA WRAP=VIRTUAL>

  The display word-wraps, but long lines are sent as one line without new-lines.

  <TEXTAREA WRAP=PHYSICAL>

  The display word-wraps, and the text is transmitted at all wrap points.

• Support for superscripts and for subscripts.

  The <SUP> </SUP> tags let you define ^superscripts.

  The <SUB> </SUB> tags let you define _subscripts.

• You can Quote me on that -- A stricter HTML parser: The HTML parser now pays close attention to quotes within HTML tags. Check your HTML source for missing quote marks if you see pages that have missing or broken images, or have pieces of text scattered about and overlaying other parts of the document.

• Netscape now conforms to GIF standards: Some GIF creation utilities produce GIF images that do not conform to standards. Such images will display empty outlines in place of the image. These outlines are much larger than the actual images. The images will not be visible at all.

  To repair these GIF images, content providers can read the offending GIF image into a different GIF utility that conforms to the GIF89a specifications, and save the image again.

• HTTP File Upload: Previously, form input was limited to input boxes and other simple elements like checkboxes and radio buttons. Now you can write forms that ask for files as input, as described in the IETF Internet Draft.

  A new "ENCTYPE" attribute on the <FORM> tag allows you to write forms that take files as input. An example of such a form would be:

  <FORM ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data" ACTION="_URL_" METHOD=POST>
  Send this file: <INPUT NAME="userfile" TYPE="file">
  <INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Send File">
  </FORM>

Security Improvements

• Technical Background:

  Netscape Navigator uses random information to generate session encryption keys. The random information is found through a variety of functions that look into a user's machine for information. Previous releases of Netscape Navigator were subject to potential vulnerabilities because the size of random input was less than the size of the subsequent keys. This means that instead of searching through all the 2^128 possible keys by brute force, a potential intruder only had to search through a significantly smaller key space by brute force.

  Netscape Navigator 2.0 incorporates fixes to the specific portion of our software where this potential vulnerability existed. We have significantly increased the amount of random information that cannot be discovered by external sources from approximately 30 bits to approximately 300 bits. Netscape has greatly expanded the techniques and sources used to generate these amounts of random information and the fixes have been reviewed and validated by several weeks of intensive testing on the Internet.

• Recommendations to users of Netscape who rely on the security of their transactions:
  • If the attacker has physical access to your machine, security cannot be assured.

  • Netscape continues to point out that if unwanted agents can log into your machine, little can be secure. For secure servers, any insecure connection mechanism could be suspect. Multi-user UNIX platforms will not be as secure as single-user machines.
    Details: Some of the system specific information that is used in the seed generation is available to any user on that system.

  • To help mitigate this, the entire user environment is passed into the seed generation algorithm. A wary user can alter his user environment before running Netscape software.

  • If someone can get root (superuser) access to your machine, they can pretty much do anything.

  • Netscape security could be weak if run on a platform emulator. Use a version native to the platform on which you are running.
    Details: Some of the usefulness of the seed generation depends upon the unpredictability of the low order bits of various clocks and timers. The clocks of many emulators may have much less entropy than the actual builtin clocks.

  • If you are running on a UNIX platform, make sure of the security of your X server. This is also true if the X connection is not to a local machine as all of the events and the data from the screen read may be captured from the ethernet.
    Details: If the attacker is monitoring your user input then its randomness is not useful.

  • It is better to perform some user action before connecting to a secure site. This means you should not set your home page to a secure site or launch your client from a command line to a secure site.
    Details: While navigating through menus or typing into various form fields, the Navigator uses the unpredictability of details of the user actions to increase the entropy of the RNG state.

• If you get an FCC Error using Mail or News, see the Read Mail with Netscape Navigator section above.
• Background images sometimes appear with abnormal colors.
• Printing might not work with some printer drivers.
• Depending on your video Driver, images might not appear when running 16 color (VGA) mode.
• MAKE SURE TO RUN THIS BETA WITH AT LEAST 5000K OF DISK CACHE, AND 600 K OF MEMORY CACHE, otherwise, you might experience some problems. You can set your cache size in Options | Network, pulldown menu.
• Object Embedding does not work.
• Alias expansion not quoted properly.
• Can't submit forms using 16 bit 2.0b1 on Windows NT.
• Can't set "Applications and Directories" preferences. That includes Telnet, TN3270, View Source, and Temp Directory. You can manually set them in the netscape.ini file or the registry.
• Quoted Document font size on 16 bit may not be correct.
• Closing the Mail Window while downloading email from the server might cause netscape to crash. Workaround: hit the stop button first then close the mail window.
• Links sometimes don't change colors after being followed.
• Can't post to news groups (yet).
• Frame borders sometimes don't display correctly after being resized.
• In Netscape Bookmarks window, File | Preferences is disabled for now.
• Can't use mouse to drag/drop or move the mail message out of your inbox but you can move mail with the Messages->Move and Messages->Copy menus.
• In Mail window, cancel from File | Open Folder will give you an Unknown Error message.
• "Time Left" when ftping or downloading a file doesn't represent correct time.
• Can't use Exchange client for Mail and News like in 1.2x.
• In Mail preferences, changing Allow 8-bit and MIME compliant options has no effect.

Known Java problems with this release include:

• Applets are killed when you leave the page.
• Resizing the window will restart applets.
• Applets continue to run if you iconify the window.
• The APPLET tag must have WIDTH and HEIGHT attibutes.
• Applets may leak resources resulting in out of memory errors.
• Some applets run unacceptably slowly.
• showStatus is unimplemented.

Bugs in the Win32 version

• Quiting an applet that has many threads sometimes crashes the Naviagtor.
• Awt scrollbars do not work.
• On Windows NT, thread priorities are incorrectly mapped so that some demos are unresponsive or difficult to use.
• On Windows NT, applets that generate sound sometimes continue playing even after you leave the page. Quitting the Navigator will stop them playing.

Plug-ins Problems

1. GetURL() effectively does nothing.
2. Still does not send SetWindow() messages upon re-size of the Window.
3. Does not set CLIP_CHILDREN style in parent window, which causes paint problems for some plugins.
4. Does not route some important Windows messages to the plug-in window, such as WM_PALETTECHANGE.
5. Valid plugin names can be only 7.3 format instead of 8.3.
6. On a page with more than one AVI file shown by the NPAVI32.DLL, the message routing bug in Navigator causes no AVIs to show until they are clicked on to start them, (there is a "blank spot" where the AVI should appear). This does not happen when only one AVI file is displayed on a page by NPAVI32.DLL.

   Note that to solve problems such as items 2, 3, and 4, above, it may be necessary to subclass the parent of the plug-in window. This causes another bug; if a page has multiple plug-ins loaded, only one plug-in may get painted. This class of bugs and the side effects of their related workarounds will go away when proper message routing from the Navigator to the plug-in window is implemented. When developing content for AVI files, the palettes of AVI files shown on the same page should match, otherwise palette thrashing will occur, causing lots of ugly flashing in 256 color mode, and bad colors.