Welcome to Netscape Navigator Version 2.0b6

NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR 2.0b6 FOR WINDOWS

You are using Netscape 2.0 Beta 6 for Windows. These release notes cover:

Requirements
New Features since 1.22

Java
JavaScript
Reading Mail and News
Updated Composition Window
New Address Book for Email
Bookmarks Featurette
Frames, Images and HTML improvements
User Interface changes
Access Improvements
International Support
Automatic Proxy Configuration.

Security Improvements
Helper Applications
Known Problems and Bugs

*** Netscape Navigator 2.0 Beta 6 expires on March 1, 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.

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).
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 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 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 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.

Message 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 HTM Ldocument. 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 single GIF image, 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>
FTP file upload: A new menu item is activated when you are browsing FTP directories. Choose File | Upload File... and you will get a dialog that asks you to choose a file to upload to the FTP server. You can also do this by dragging a file (or multiple files) from the File Manager/Explorer, to an FTP directory listing in the Netscape Window. Note: You need to have write permission on the server where you are uploading the file(s).

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., Japanese 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.

Automatic Proxy Configuration

Automatic Proxy Configuration: It is now easier to specify complicated proxy configurations for an entire site. You can tell the Navigator to use different proxies depending on the URL or host being contacted. It's easier to specify a large number of hosts that should not be using a proxy.

Instead of specifying only one proxy per protocol, it is possible to allow different proxies based on URL wildcard pattern matching. You can also have multiple proxies to provide proxy failover support if the primary proxy becomes unavailable or unresponsive.

Proxy Configuration File Format: The proxy configuration is specified in a script and stored at a particular URL on a server. Since it is stored in a central location, the system administrator can easily update the proxy configuration for the whole site without having to reconfigure each individual user's Navigator.
The configuration file has the MIME content-type of
and is written in JavaScript.
We have provided a document describing the syntax for the Automatic Proxy Configuration URL File Format.
Using the Automatic Proxy Configuration: To use the Automatic Proxy Configuration, go to the Options Menu | Network | Proxies... panel in the Navigator, check the Auto Proxy Configuration box and enter the URL of the proxy configuration file on the server.
The manual proxy configuration panel is still available. Just check the appropriate radio button in the Proxy Preferences panel and enter your proxy and socks hosts.
As before, the default is not to use proxies.

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.

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 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/.

KNOWN PROBLEMS/BUGS

Navigator problems:

After setting the "Maximum Message Size" field, in Mail and News Preferences | Servers, you need to quit Netscape and run it again for the value to take effect.
"Reply-to-Address" as specified in Mail and News Preferences | Identity, has not been implemented in this release.
Pressing Spacebar will unsubscribe a newsgroup from the List, in the News Window.
When Printing forms, only the Form Labels appear; and not the user-input text or the Radio buttons.
When you use the right mouse to view a single GIF image (in 256 color mode), you might experience a "screen flash" when the custom colormap is installed.
If you are running in 256 color mode and have a Windows background (wallpaper) image present, minimizing then restoring Netscape, might cause images and the Netscape logo to appear in strange colors. Workarounds: open a new Netscape window (then close it if you wish), or remove the Windows background image.
If you are crashing a lot running 2.0, please delete or rename your old history file "NETSCAPE.HST".
The Apply button in Preferences is grayed out and not functional.

JavaScript bugs:

An IMG tag without HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes may cause JavaScript event handlers on subsequent form elements to be ignored. Workarounds: add HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes to all IMG tags, or add an empty SCRIPT tag after all form elements that have JavaScript event handlers.
The selected Index 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 the Navigator is 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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