Welcome to Netscape Navigator Version 2.0b4

NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR 2.0b4 FOR WINDOWS

You are using Netscape 2.0 Beta 4 for Windows. These release notes cover:

Requirements
New Features in Beta 4
New Features since 1.22

Java
JavaScript
Reading Mail and News
Images / HTML
UI changes
Access Improvements
International Support

Security Improvements
Known Problems and Bugs

*** Netscape Navigator 2.0 Beta 4 expires on February 15, 1996. ***

REQUIREMENTS

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 may 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.

BETA 4 FEATURES

Send Now or Send Later - Deferred Mail : Netscape allows you to compose all your email offline and then send them all at once. When you're in the Message Composition Window, select Deferred Delivery from the Options menu. Deffered mail is stored in the OUTBOX folder. When you exit the Mail Window (or exit Netscape completely), you will be asked if you want the messages to be sent. You can also choose "File" | "Send Mail in Outbox" (from the Netscape Mail Window), to send all your deferred Mail.
New Java feature
- Applets may now be run from file: URLs.
New JavaScript features
- New date, math, and string functions
- Navigator object with userAgent, etc., properties
- BODY and FRAMESET may have onLoad and onUnload attributes, which become window event handler properties called when documents and framesets are loaded and unloaded.
- <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> is equivalent to "LiveScript"
- JavaScript now treats identifiers in a case-sensitive fashion. The "history" object therefore cannot be referred to as "History", for example.
- FORM tags may have NAME attributes, so that JavaScript can refer to a named form as document.myForm where NAME="myForm" in the FORM tag, rather than as document.forms[0] for the first form, document.forms[1] for the second, etc.
Startup Launch: You can specify which window Netscape opens whenever you start it. Select General Preferences from the Options menu, choose the Appearance tab, and then select whether you want to display Netscape's Browser, Mail, or News window (the default is Netscape Browser).

WHAT'S NEW?

Java Applets

Support for Java Applets:

Java is currently supported on Windows 95 and Windows NT.

There is a preference to disable Java applets located in the General panel of the security preferences. Java support is enabled by default.

The version of Java supported by Netscape Navigator is compatible with the 1.0 Beta 2 version of the Java(tm) Developers Kit(JDK) from Sun Microsystems. Please see http://www.javasoft.com/JDK-beta2/index.html for more info.

Applets written for the ALPHA release of the HotJava browser are not compatible with this later version of Java.

There is an index of Beta compatible Java applets at http://www.gamelan.com/

For more info about Java, please see the Java Applets Page.

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.

See the online JavaScript Documentation.

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.
Mail Password: Netscape Mail remembers your mail password. To enable this feature, check the "Remember Mail Password" on the Organization panel of the mail and news preferences.

New Mail Indicator: There is a mail preference " Check for mail every n minutes" on the Servers panel of the mail and news preferences. As long as the Navigator is running it will check for new mail at the specified frequency. If there is new mail the mail will not be automatically downloaded; the mail indicator in the lower right corner of the Browser, Mail, and News windows will change appearance. Click the mail indicator to open the Mail window and retrieve new mail.

Find: You can search for text in the headers of mail and news messages using the Find command located on the Edit menu. Find searches the displayed headers of the messages in the current folder, starting with the current message. Use Find Again to continue with the next message.

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.

Mail and News Composition Window

Updated Mail and News Composition: A new Mail and News composition window lets you send new messages, and reply to or forward existing messages. Use the Options Menu | Show All Headers command to find fields for carbon copy, blind carbon copy (Bcc:), and file carbon copy (Fcc:) where you can save a copy for yourself.
Link to the address book: You can type the names of users or mailing lists into the To:, CC:, and BCC: fields. When you click on a new field with the mouse, or hit tab, the email addresses will be expanded. Double-clicking on an entry in the address book will bring up a new Composition window, addressed to that address.
Multiple Attachments: The Attach button lets you add and delete multiple attachments to your email message, including both local files and URLs.
AppleDouble Attachments: Files sent as attachments from the Macintosh version of the Navigator are sent using AppleDouble encoding, which allows for the preservation of Macintosh file forks. On Windows and Unix versions of Navigator, you have the option of receiving these attachments as either a Macintosh file, which can be saved and transferred for use on a Macintosh, or as a data file which can be used on the receiving platform.
More Options: Look at the Options Menu | Mail and News... | Compose pane for more mail composition options.

Address Book for email addresses

Address Book Window: The address book looks and works very much like the bookmarks. You can view the whole address book by going to the Window Menu and choosing Address Book.
Add Users from the Address Book Window's Item Menu, or automatically create an entry from the Message Menu in the Mail or News window.
Do you have lists of people to send mail to? In the Address Book window, mailing lists are represented by the folder icon. Add list entries from the Address Book Window's Item menu, then drag and drop individual users into the list/folders.
You can use these List and User entries in three ways. You can type the nicknames into the mail composition window in the To:, CC:, and BCC: fields. You can also double-click on an icon in the Address Book window to bring up a pre-addressed composition window.

New Bookmarks Feature

Checks for changed Bookmarks: In Bookmark window, There is a What's New? menu item in the File menu that brings up a window that you can use to identify bookmarks that have changed since you last visited them. You can choose to check all bookmarks in the bookmark list, or just the selected bookmarks and bookmarks inside selected folders.

Better Images and Document Presentation

Frames -- Multiple documents on one page: Frames are a way of specifying multiple, independent, scrollable regions within a display window. Each frame can contain a seperate HTML document. Users can scroll and resize frames, at the choice of the page creator. Each frame can also be given NAME values, so they can be targeted by links in other documents or other frames. These features provide a powerful new way of presenting documents.
Frame Development Information
Cool Examples of Frames
I've been framed!
Targeted 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. They are especially useful with frames.
Here's the whole story in a new window.
The syntax for the targeted 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: You are presented with an image that you can click on to take you to a number of different sites.
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.
Background Image: Netscape no longer waits for the background image to completely arrive before displaying any text and images on a page. When the background image has been decoded the page is redrawn to include the background.
Custom Colormap: For those running in 256 color mode, pages with a single GIF image should look better because a custom colormap is installed. This is for GIF images only and not for JPEG images. To view a .gif image by itself, use right mouse button to click on the image, and choose "View this Image" from the pop-up menu.
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, or part of a WORD! The syntax for the FONT tag is as follows:
<FONT COLOR="#FF0000">Red</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#00FF00">Green</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Blue</FONT>

You can also use Color Names instead color codes. For Example, the syntax could also be:
<FONT COLOR="Purple">Purple</FONT>
This is also true with the <BODY BGCOLOR="Black" TEXT="White"> tag.
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.
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.

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

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>

International Support

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:
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.
Options | General Preferences | Language "Accept Language" enables the user to select a prioritized list of language/region codes that reflect what language a user wishes to display a document in, if that document is available in different language translations. The "accept language" information is contained in the HTTP Header's HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE. A server that provides different language versions of the same content could thus accomodate a user's preferred language.
Options | Document Encoding selection can be changed when viewing Mail and News in addition to the Web Browser window. The selected encoding will be applied to enable viewing of documents of different encodings (e.g. Japanese) provided the user's system supports fonts for that locale.

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).
Users who want to regularly view documents in encodings other than Latin1 should use the Options | Document Encoding menu item to choose the encoding, then select Options | Save Options to make it the default setting. For example, Japanese users will want to select Japanese (Auto-detect) from the Document Encoding list, then choose Save Options.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

KNOWN PROBLEMS/BUGS

Deferred Mail Crashes (on 16 bit only) when you try to Send the Mail in your OUTBOX. This will be fixed next time.
"Save As" in News is not working properly. Saved documents in News will be improperly formatted if saved as HTML.
Pressing Spacebar will unsubscribe a newsgroup from the List, in the News Window.
Some flashing might occur when a custom color map gets installed for .gif images.
If you are crashing a lot running 2.0 please delete or rename your old history file "NETSCAPE.HST".

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.
The window.close() method is not yet implemented.
Operating on a closed window may crash.
You can't call a function in another frame or window.
Double-precision floating point to string conversions are subject to platform-dependent accuracy bugs and boundary (NaN, +/-Inf) glitches.
<SCRIPT SRC=...> is not yet implemented.

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.

Known bugs in International support.

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.


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