Welcome to Netscape Navigator Beta Release 4

NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR FOR WINDOWS
BETA RELEASE 4

Customers can download and try this beta version, however, we cannot comment on product availability and price. As with all prerelease or beta versions of software, we recommend that you only use the software for evaluation purposes.

*** Netscape Navigator Beta Release 4 ***
*** expires after August 15, 1996 ***

*** CoolTalk expires August 15, 1996 ***

These release notes cover:

Other Information:

Look in the Help Menu under Handbook
Look in the Help Menu under Frequently Asked Questions
CoolTalk by InSoft
Live3D's Frequently Asked Questions
Live3D's README
Helper Applications
Release notes for earlier betas and other releases.

WHAT'S NEW?

General Features

New Directory buttons: The directory button toolbar now includes Destinations and People. Net Directory and Handbook have been removed.
New Directory menu items: The Directory menu now has items for Netscape Destinations and People. Internet Directory and Internet White Pages have been removed.
New Navigation for Frames and the Back button: Now, when you click on a link that updates a frame, pressing the Back button returns you to the previous state of the frame. Previously, pressing the Back button ignored updates within a page's frames and always returned you to the previous whole page (further back than you probably wanted). In short, navigating among frames now works on a per frame basis: pressing Back revisits the previous frame and pressing Forward revisits the frame ahead.
Three-pane configurability: A pane layout option has been added to the Mail and News|Appearance panel (choose the Options|Mail and News Preferences|Appearance menu item). The panel offers radio buttons to designate the layout of the three panes in the Mail and News windows. Choose Split Horizontal (Articles on top on Macintosh) to align the message content pane to the right of the two split panes. Choose Split Vertical (Articles on left on Macintosh) to align the message content pane below the two split panes. Choose Stack (Stacked on Macintosh) to align the message content pane below the two stacked panes (layered in rows atop one another).
Show recipient in Sent Folder and Outbox: When you select a mail folder by clicking on it, the message heading pane displays the titles of messages contained in that folder. In previous versions, you'd always see the title Sender above a column that shows the name of the sender of the mail message. Now, in the Outbox and Sent Mail folders, you'll see the title Recipient instead of Sender, and the column shows the email address of the mail recipient. For sent mail, the recipient info is much more useful than the sender info (typically yourself).
Compressed headers: When viewing either the Mail or News window, the Options menu now offers a cascading (hierarchical) menu items called Show Headers that replaces the Show All Headers item. The new menu item gives you more options to control the number of header information fields displayed when viewing messages. All displays all possible header fields. Normal displays the primary address fields. Brief displays only subject and recipient fields.
Support table cell background colors: You can specify a background color to be used when displaying table cells. To specify a table background color use the bgcolor attribute. Nested tables inherit background colors.
Color Cells
One Color

Another Color

The bgcolor tag specifies one of the supported color names and can be used with the following tags: table, td, th, and tr.
Here's the HTML that produced the table on the right.
Netscape Navigator Gold: Netscape Navigator Gold has been updated for Win32 and Mac. Gold now lets you edit tables.
New Network preferences panels: New Network|Protocols and Network|Languages preference panels to expand and improve user preferences for security and privacy control.

Color Cells
One Color
Another Color

LiveAudio

Plug-in: This plug-in is an asynchronous sound-playing application, capable of playing AIFF, MIDI, WAV, and AU sound formats. The plug-in can be controlled using various views.
Supported Platforms: Win 16, Win 32, Mac 68K, and Mac PPC
System Requirements:
- Win 16: (Minimum) 386 Processor with Windows 3.1, and a compatible sound card installed.
- Win 32: (Minimum) 386 Processor with Windows 95 or Windows NT, and a compatible sound card installed.
- Macintosh (68K): (Minimum) Macintosh 68030, with System 7.1, QuickTime 2.1 (with Musical Instrument Plug-in), and Sound Manager 3.1.
- Macintosh (PPC): (Minimum) Macintosh with a PPC 601 (66MHz), System 7.1.2, QuickTime 2.1 (with Musical Instrument Plug-in), and Sound Manager 3.1.

QuickTime

Plug-in: This plug-in automatically plays QuickTime movies (.mov files) including movies with text, MIDI, and other kinds of data. A page developer can use HTML commands to automatically play a movie for you or to present a controller giving you the ability to play, stop, fast-forward, and rewind movies.
Supported Platforms: Win 16, Win 32, Mac 68K, and Mac PPC
System Requirements:
- PC (Win 16 or Win 32): Windows 95, NT, or 3.1, compatible sound card, and QuickTime 2.1.1 for Windows.
- Macintosh (68K or PPC): Macintosh with System 7.0 or later, QuickTime 2.1, and Sound Manager 3.2.

Live3D

Plug-in: This plug-in extends Netscape Navigator so that you can experience distributed, interactive 3D spaces rich with text, images, animation, sound, music, and video. In addition to providing a high-performance VRML viewer, Live3D extends Netscape's Java, JavaScript, and plug-in interfaces to make it easy to develop distributed 3D applications on the Netscape Navigator platform.
Supported Platforms: Win 32, Win 16, Macintosh PPC
System Requirements: Windows 95, Windows NT, or Windows 3.1 for PC; System 7.x for Mac PPC

LiveVideo

Plug-in: This plug-in will play AVI movies. AVI is a common video format on Windows.
Supported Platforms: Win 16, Win 32
System Requirements:
- Win 16: (Minimum) 386 Processor with Windows 3.1, and a compatible sound card installed. Will require "Video for Windows."
- Win 32: (Minimum) 386 Processor with Windows 95 or Windows NT, and a compatible sound card installed.

CoolTalk

Helper Application: This helper application is a real-time audio and data collaboration tool specifically designed for the Internet. CoolTalk provides full-duplex audio conferencing, allowing both users to speak and be heard simultaneously. Unlike audio-only Internet products, CoolTalk includes a Chat Tool and Shared Whiteboard for textual and graphical data conferencing.

IS411 Server: An interactive version of the IS411 server is available at live.netscape.com. The IS411 server may be used to interactively search for and connect to other registered CoolTalk users.
Supported Platforms: Win 32, Unix (hpux, irix, osf1, sol23, sol24, sun4)
System Requirements:
- Win 32:
  486, 50 MHZ or higher 8 MB RAM
  Internet Winsock 1.1 compatible TCP/IP connection
  14.4 Kbps or higher network connection
  MS Windows 95, MS Windows 3.1 or MS Windows NT 3.51
  MS Windows compatible sound card
  Microphone which can be connected to the sound card for audio input
  Multimedia speakers for audio output.
- UNIX: (Note that all UNIX configurations require a minimum of 24 MB of RAM and a microphone for voice input.)
  SunOS 4.1.3 or higher
  Solaris 2.3, 2.4
  Digital UNIX 3.2 with MME 2.0 (Multimedia Services)
  HP/UX 9.0[357] with patches PHKL_6050 and PHSS_6213 These patches are required for driver/kernel changes and the correct Aserver
  SGI 5.2

Java

Mac Support: Java support has been added to the Macintosh Power PC and 68K platforms allowing users to run Java applets. Applets are software programs written in the Java language that can be integrated within HTML pages.
UNIX Support: Java support has been added to the IBM AIX and BSDI platforms.
Security: A security problem relating to DNS has been fixed.

JavaScript

JavaScript reflection of plug-ins: Allows developers to dynamically determine what plug-ins are installed on the client. By making the list of installed plug-ins accessible through JavaScript, content developers can write simple scripts to display embedded plug-in data if the appropriate plug-in is installed, or display some alternative information (image, text, etc.) if not.
JavaScript currently has a global "navigator" object which contains properties for information not associated with any particular document. This object now has two additional properties: a "mimeTypes" object and a "plugins" object.
The mimeTypes object is an array of all MIME types supported by the client (either internally, via helper apps, or by plug-ins). Each element of the array is a mimeType object, which has properties for its type, description, and file extensions.
The plugins object is an array of all plug-ins currently installed on the client. Each element of the array is a plugin object, which has properties for its name and description, as well as a subarray of mimetype objects for the types supported by that plugin.
JavaScript fixes: Incremental improvements.

LiveConnect

(Java, JavaScript, and Plug-in Connectivity)

Netscape's LiveConnect lets you integrate Java, JavaScript and Navigator plug-ins. This allows you to create plug-ins and applets that can be controlled by Java and JavaScript, or use Java and JavaScript to implement portions of your plug-in. Fundamentally, LiveConnect allows you to call:
1. Java methods from plug-ins.
2. Native methods implemented in plug-ins from Java.
3. Java methods from JavaScript.
4. JavaScript from Java methods.
You can find further information about Java-to-plug-in connections and Java-to-JavaScript connections by choosing Netscape's Help|Handbook menu item. Near the top of the Handbook contents page are links to latest versions of the JavaScript Guide and Plug-in Guide.

Security

New section in Security preferences panel: New Secure Network Protocol section in Security|General Preferences to control access to SSL v2 and SSL v3.
Note: The security features described below are not yet fully implemented and do not offer any current functionality. Though elements of the user interface can be viewed in the preference panels, they should not be used. Certain buttons might cause crashes.
Security Preferences: Two new security preference panels have been added to enable forthcoming security features. A short summary of the forthcoming features are described below.
Personal Certificate panel: Personal certificates identify you to others on the Internet. For example, when you submit information in a form, your personal certificate allows the recipient of the form to know the information came from you and no one else.
You may wish to obtain more than one personal certificate. Some web sites may request (and issue to you) a personal certificate for specific use with their site. You may also obtain more generic personal certificates that represent you for credit card transactions or other nonspecific, secure communications.
Passwords panel: A Netscape password protects you if your computer can be physically accessed by other people or remotely accessed through a network. Your password protects your security certificates.

Expanded support

POP3 servers: The Keep Mail on Server and Maximum Message Size options now work even with POP3 servers that do not implement the UIDL command.
Special characters: Additional entity names such as "£" are now implemented.

Macintosh-only Changes

Open Transport native: Native support for Apple Open Transport.
Internet Config: Basic Internet Config features are supported. Internet Config is a public domain system extension that lets you configure Internet information such as email address and server names in a single source location. This is useful if you are using multiple Internet applications. Supporting applications can find this information, making it unnecessary for you to enter the same information in each of your Internet applications.
Tooltips: An item in the Options|General Preferences|Appearance panel lets you turn on tooltips so that when the mouse stays over a toolbar button, tooltip text appears.
Unread mail and news messages: Are now marked in bold.
Helpers panel: The Options|General Preferences|Helpers panel has been redesigned to simplify editing, adding, and deleting helper applications and plug-ins.
User-interface improvements: Several minor changes regarding fonts, spacing, and tabs. Improved design in toolbar and preferences panels.
Enable active scrolling option:The General|Appearance preference panel has a check box to allow active window scrolling. When checked, movement of the scroll bar thumb causes the content area to scroll as you drag. When unchecked, movement of the scroll bar thumb causes the content area to scroll only after the mouse button is released. The default is checked. On slower computers, scrolling performance might improve when the setting is unchecked.

Windows-only Changes

Forms Printing: The printing of forms has been improved.
Image Presentation:Image outlines and alt text are presented before image loading.

UNIX-only Changes

Plug-in support on UNIX platforms: SGI IRIX, SunOS, Solaris 2.3, Solaris 2.4, DEC OSF/1, HP/UX.
Frame Source and Frame Info: The View menu has items for Frame Source and Frame Info, available when a frame is selected.
Quoted text color: The Mail and News Preferences|Appearance panel has a field that lets you enter the color of your quoted text.
Hide menu bar: The Options menu has an item to let you hide the menu bar. Use the right mouse button to display the pop-up menu containing an item to show the menu bar again.
Drag-and-drop attachments: To create an attachment, you can drag a mail message item from the message pane to the attachment field of the Composition window.
Drag-and-drop news: You can drag News window articles to store them in Mail window folders.
HP/UX: The HP/UX platform now has dynamic linking.
Helpers panel: The Options|General Preferences|Helpers panel has been redesigned to simplify editing, adding, and deleting helper applications and plug-ins.

NEW FOR THIS BETA

The directory button toolbar now includes Destinations and People. Net Directory and Handbook have been removed.
The Directory menu now has items for Netscape Destinations and People. Internet Directory and Internet White Pages have been removed.
The Security|Passwords preference panel has been simplified. The option to not use a password is built into the Set Password/Change Password button.

CONFIGURATION AND MIGRATION

Configuring Live3D for 16 bit Windows: Move the 3DNS16A.EXE file from your plugins directory to a temporary directory. Double click on the file to launch the Live3D installer.
In 16 bit Windows version ,both CoolTalk and AVI Plugins requires Video for Windows.

KNOWN PROBLEMS

Quicktime Plug-In:

You must install Quicktime for Windows first, before viewing any Quicktime Movies in Netscape Navigator.

You can download Quicktime for Windows from: http://quicktime.apple.com/qt/sw/sw.html
For more instructions on Quicktime, check the README.TXT.

CoolTalk:

If you had previously installed the CoolTalk Watchdog, you need to uninstall it by un-installing Netscape Navigator, and then reboot your machine before installing the latest version of the Navigator. In WindowsNT and Windows3.x, you can also do that by removing the Cooltalk Watchdog Icon from the Startup Program Group, and then restart Windows before installing Netscape Navigator 3.0b4.
In Windows95, you can right mouse click on the Cooltalk Watchdog Icon and exit before installing Netscape Navigator 3.0b4. You will find the Cooltalk Watchdog Icon (if turned on) in the right corner of the Win95 Task Bar.
During installation of CoolTalk, the command line argument for the Watchdog is incorrect. It should read as follows:
wdog.exe /v "path to CoolTalk executable"\cooltalk.exe
If your connection to the Internet is behind a firewall, you may have problems connecting to other CoolTalk users outside your firewall. See your system administrator for details.

Live3D:

You may get an error dialog box mentioning that Netscape cannot decode x-gzip files when the VRML worlds are loaded with Live3D. You should ignore this error dialog and click OK.
You may experience a GPF when quitting the Navigator after having viewed certain VRML worlds with the Live3D plugin.

Netscape is not showing the most recent version of web pages:

If you have old data in your disk cache, you may still see the problem where Netscape Navigator is not showing you the most recent version of the web pages because of daylight savings time conflicts. To remedy this problem, clear your disk cache the first time you run the Navigator.
If you have cleared your disk cache, and are still seeing this problem, go to Help Menu|How to Give Feedback and tell us about the problem.

Navigator Problems:

After setting any preferences in Mail (or News) , you need to quit the Mail (or News) application and run it again for the value to take effect.
Pressing Spacebar will unsubscribe a newsgroup from the List, in the News Window.
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: 1) Open a new Netscape window (then close it if you wish). 2) Remove the Windows background image.
When Un-installing Netscape, you might get a File Error Dialog that says "Cannot find CTL3D.DLL"; click on the Close button and the Un-installation will continue.
If Netscape is crashing in the video driver, ensure that you are using the latest drivers for your Video card. You can obtain the latest drivers on-line or by contacting your Video Card's manufacturer.
The Up/Down direction box in the Find dialog in Mail & News are not implemented yet.
You will not receive a warning dialog when sending a message when your disk is out of space. An empty message will be sent to the recipient(s).
The 32bit install does not currently remove obsolete DLLs if you install Atlas Preview Release 2 on top of previous version of the Navigator.
Documents in a frame won't reload. The frameset will reload, but the individual frames won't reload.
Audio Plugin does not get launched correctly with audio file as a Mail Attachment.
Cannot open the Navigator easily , if in the previous session one enters non lower case letters in the Nickname column of Address Book | Item |Add User or Add List. You will get the error message few times. Just keep clicking the OK button until the Navigator opens.
Images aren't transparent in table cells with a background color.
Referer field is not sent in frame documents.
Deleting Certificates: When deleting certificates or CA's, it is a good idea to exit and restart the Navigator to make certain that the change took effect.
Socket is already connected: If you can't connect to secure (https://) sites because of a network error message saying the socket is already connected, check Options|Security|General and make sure SSL2 and SSL3 are enabled.

JavaScript Bugs:

The click method of buttons and other form elements does not work.
The onLoad event handler may be called early for non-frameset documents that contain images. Workaround: use window.setTimeout() to poll for the reflection of form elements that your onLoad handler wants to see.
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 one empty SCRIPT tag after the last form element that has a JavaScript event handler.
The lastIndexOf method should search a string backwards starting at the fromIndex position. In this release, it starts one character before the fromIndex position.
You should be able to set the form object's method property at any time. It is read-only in this release.
The documentation for the name property states "If multiple objects on the same form have the same NAME attribute, an array of the given name is created automatically... Elements are indexed in source order starting at 0." In Atlas Preview Release 2, elements are indexed in source order if the object contains an event handler. If the object does not contain an event handler, they are indexed in reverse order.
Radio buttons in the same radio object should be indexed in source order starting at 0. In Atlas Preview Release 2, they are indexed in reverse order.
The window.status property always evaluates to the string value of window.defaultStatus.
If you do not specify a set of windowFeatures when you call window.open in a UNIX environment, the window is created without any of the Boolean features.
Calling document.close() from top-level code within a script tag may crash Navigator. It is safe to close documents that you open; only close on the currently-loading document is unsafe.
The Math properties E,LOG2E,LOG10E,LN2,PI,SQRT2,SQRT1_2 are erroneously defined as global properties, not as properties of the Math object. So rather than Math.E, you need to use just E. Workaround that is compatible with future and past releases: with (Math) {...E;}.
Objects held by properties are not always freed because of a reference counting bug.
The scrollbar is sometimes missing from pages with Javascript. Just hit the spacebar to make the scrollbar appear.
New document.write() behavior: A document.write() call from an event handler no longer keeps JavaScript variables and objects functioning in a page. This could be a security problem. Instead ,use a separate window, or do a large write or use frames.
Heavy use of JavaScript applets will cause memory leaks on your system, especially on Windows 3.1

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 time-zone (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 APPLET tag must have WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes.
Can't start Java Applets: Make sure Java is turned on. Check Options | Network Preferences..| Languages.
Heavy use of Java applets will cause memory leaks.

LiveConnect Bugs:

Java "long" values can't be passed to or from javascript
Network activity in Java code called from JavaScript may hang the Navigator. The most common cause of this is opening a java.net.URL or referring to a Java class that must be loaded from the network. The workaround is to do these operations from a Java thread, or to make sure that the class is loaded by calling a static method on it in the applet's init routine.
JavaScript calls to overloaded Java methods may not be resolved correctly.
There is no access to multidimensional Java arrays from JavaScript.
It is necessary to have the MAYSCRIPT attribute in the applet tag if the applet has to call JavaScript: if this isn't present the JSObject.getWindow() routine will return null.
There is a bug in beta 4 that may allow applets to call JavaScript without the MAYSCRIPT attribute.
LiveConnect is disabled if either Java or JavaScript are disabled in Options | Network Preferences | Languages.

Putting percent signs (%) into URLs: Netscape now assumes URL encoding on mailto: URLs and other types of URLs. If you want to put a percent sign (%) into a URL, you need to represent it as its hex code. Substitute "%25" for the percent sign. For example,

<A HREF="mailto:user%25uucp-host@somewhere.com">mail</A> to send mail to: user%uucp-host@somewhere.com

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 mis-display. The names of the fonts may also mis-display. 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 multi-byte characters in forms is not implemented in this release.


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NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR FOR WINDOWS BETA RELEASE 4