Java Applets

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.

• 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 listpane, and a message text pane. You can adjust the relative sizes of thepanes by dragging the pane dividers. You may want to start bymaking the mail folder pane a little wider so that you can see thenames of the mail folders. The individual columns in each panecan be adjusted. Hold the mouse over the column titles. A cornerwill activate when you're at the end of a column title. You can dragand 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 toGet New Mail. You can navigate through your mail messagesby clicking on the "Date", "Sender", or "Subject" fields of themessage list pane. The buttons and Go Menu also help you navigate.

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

• 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, 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.

• 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 foldercalled "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 thenews hosts, newsgroups, and articles. It uses the same type of 3-paned window that the Mail reader uses. Your existing newsrcfile is compatible with the new news interface.

• Reading News Articles:Reading news is very much like reading mail messages. Instead ofGetting New Mail, you can click on the newsgroup to bring up thelist 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

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 informationabout all of the images and grid documents in your browser window.The information is displayed in a separate window. You can clickon the links in the top half of that window to change the detailed informationin the bottom half of the window. It's also a good demonstration of frames.

Access Improvements

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:
  "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.

• 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 sessionencryption keys. The random information is found through a variety offunctions that look into a user's machine for information. Previousreleases of Netscape Navigator were subject to potential vulnerabilitiesbecause the size of random input was less than the size of thesubsequentkeys. This means that instead of searching through all the 2^128possiblekeys by brute force, a potential intruder only had to search through asignificantly smaller key space by brute force.

  Netscape Navigator 2.0 incorporates fixes to the specific portionof our software where this potential vulnerability existed. We havesignificantly increased the amount of random informationfrom 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 oftheirtransactions:
  • If the attacker has physical access to your machine, securitycannot be assured.

  • Netscape continues to point out that if unwanted agents can log intoyour machine, little can be secure. For secure servers, any insecureconnection mechanism could be suspect. Multi-user UNIX platforms willnot be as secure as single-user machines.
    Details: Some of the system specific information that is used in theseed generation is available to any user on that system.

  • To help mitigate this, the entire user environment is passed intothe seed generation algorithm. Wary users can alter their user environmentbefore running Netscape software.

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

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

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

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

Navigator problems:

• "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.
• When you use the right mouse to view .gif images, some flashing might occur when a custom color map gets installed.
• 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.

Java problems with the 32bit Navigator:

• Java will not run using the 32bit Trumpet Winsock. If you want to use trumpet winsock with the navigator, java must be disabled.
• Java requires at least a 256 color video driver. If you want to use the navigator with less than 256 colors, java must be disabled.
• The Java Console window has a limit to the amount of text it can display. Once the window fills up, it must be cleared before new text will appear.
• java.lang.Math.IEEERemainder(...) returns incorrect results.
• In order for a Date object to display the timezone (ie. PST) the TZ environment variable must be set (for both NT and Win95).
• The AWT File Dialog box is not implemented. An exception is thrown if you try to create a java.awt.FileDialog object.
• The java.util.Date object is broken.
• 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.