JavaScript

Built-in JavaScript: Netscape Navigator now includes a built-in scripting language, called JavaScript. JavaScript development is based on the JAVA language, which extends and enhances the capability of HTML documents. JavaScript supports most of JAVA's expression syntax and basic control flow constructs, but without JAVA's strong type checking and static typing. JavaScript is embedded in HTML documents with a SCRIPT tag, and there is no compilation needed to run the script.

Read Mail with the Netscape Navigator

• Reading your email: A new Mail Window allows you to read your email, sort the messages, file them in folders, and mail replies.

• New Mail Reading Window: The Mail Window has 3 panes: a mail folder pane, a message list pane, and a message text pane. You can adjust the relative sizes of the panes by dragging the pane dividers. You may want to start by making the mail folder pane a little wider so that you can see the names of the mail folders. The individual columns in each pane can be adjusted. Hold the mouse over the column titles. A corner will activate when you're at the end of a column title. You can drag and drop the corner to resize the columns.

  Netscape comes with a sample mail message. Click on the "inbox" folder to see the message. You can use the toolbar button or menu to Get New Mail. You can navigate through your mail messages by clicking on the "Date", "Sender", or "Subject" fields of the message list pane. The buttons and Go Menu also help you navigate.

  A bold message in the message list signifies that you have not read this message yet. Once you read it, it becomes normal (i.e. unbold).

• Organizing your Mail: The Sort Menu allows you to view your list of messages in various ways. You can even thread the messages by subject. The Edit Menu lets you select and delete messages. Deleted messages are put in a mail folder called "trash". You can create other mail folders with the File Menu.

Brand new News Interface

• New News Reading Window: The News Reader was rewritten to provide a more concise view of the news hosts, newsgroups, and articles. It uses the same type of 3-paned window that the Mail reader uses. Your existing newsrc file is compatible with the new news interface.

• Reading News Articles: Reading news is very much like reading mail messages. Instead of Getting New Mail, you can click on the newsgroup to bring up the list of articles and see the new ones that have arrived.

Better Images and Document Presentation

User Interfaces

• Rearranged Tabbed dialog panels for Preferences: The panels were rearranged and several changes were made to accommodate new features.

• View Menu | Document Information in an HTML page: Document Information gives you detailed information about all of the images and grid documents in your browser window. The information is displayed in a separate window. You can click on the links in the top half of that window to change the detailed information in the bottom half of the window. It's also a good demonstration of frames.

Access Improvements

Additional Languages and MIME Charsets Supported

• Previous releases support browsing Western European languages and Japanese. Navigator 2.0 adds support for Central European (latin2) languages, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

• MIME charsets supported include:
  "us-ascii", "iso-8859-1", "x-mac-roman", "iso-8859-2", "x-mac-ce",
  "iso-2022-jp","x-sjis", "x-euc-jp",
  "euc-kr", "iso-2022-kr",
  "gb2312", "gb_2312-80"
  "x-euc-tw", "x-cns11643-1", "x-cns11643-2", "big5"

• The support of languages requires the appropriate system font is installed on your system.

• For Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, the system must also provide support for 2-byte codes and input methods. For Windows, you will need Japanese Windows, Korean Windows or Chinese Windows.

META Tag Extension for MIME Charset Info

• The IETF draft on Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language proposes an extension to the HTML META tag to allow MIME charset information to be contained in the HTML document:

  <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

• This support is in Navigator 2.0 and the MIME charset values supported includes all the charsets mentioned above in the section on "Additional Languages and MIME Charsets Supported.

Document Encoding User Interface

• Document Encoding Defaults are now easier to change. Previous releases provided a preference panel to globally set the default character encoding of incoming documents.

• Navigator 2.0 makes the default selection more accessible by moving it to the "Options | Document Encoding->" menu item.

• Document encoding defaults are no longer global, so that a user may have multiple browser windows open in different default encodings (e.g., Japanse in one and French in another).

• User Defined encoding is available for encodings that we have not yet added support.

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 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. Wary users can alter their 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.

• Disk cache on the 16 bit Navigator does not work properly.
• Helper Applications have to be set (from General Preferences) every time you run the 16 bit Navigator.
• Auto Check mail every X minutes is not working (yet).
• Can't drag a link from the Main Netscape Window to the Bookmarks Window.
• When Deleting or Adding items to the Bookmark Window, the changes will not reflect the Bookmark menu item.
• If you click outside the AddressBook Property Window, occasionally, your machine might Freeze or GPF.
• 16 bit help in preferences is not functional yet.
• If you are crashing a lot running 2.0 please delete or rename your old history file "NETSCAPE.HST".
• Can't submit forms using 16 bit 2.0 on Windows NT.

• JavaScript bugs:
  • The selectedIndex property of SELECT popups is always the number of options, not the selected option's index.
  • The INPUT focus() and select() force focus into an input tag and select its contents, respectively, but they don't display the usual visual cues such as insertion caret and highlighting.

Known Java problems with the 32bit Navigator:

• The APPLET tag must have WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes.
• Applet audio sometimes doesn't work correctly on NT systems.
• The Java console window cannot be closed using the system menu.
• On 256 color systems some colormap flashing may occur.
• When moving between pages, applets may occasionally appear on the wrong page. Choose Refresh from the View menu to correct this.

Known bugs in International support.

• Document Encoding | User defined has not been implemented.
• When sending mail, Navigator doesn't do MimePartII conversion for sender. Thus name of sender may display incorrectly if sender name contains multibyte characters.
• If Navigator used on a machine using Japanese Windows locale, the text on several buttons in the Options | General Preferences | Fonts dialog box will misdisplay. The names of the fonts may also misdisplay. However, the font functionality is unaffected. They will display correctly when viewing documents, mail, or news (if you map that font to the document encoding you have selected via Options | Document Encoding, and the document you are viewing was encoded using that character set).
• Entering multibyte characters in forms is not implemented in this release.