NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR 1.1 BETA 1 FOR UNIX

UPDATE & VERSION INFORMATION

• This is a beta version of 1.1. The currently released Netscape Navigator version 1.0N will continue to be available on our server until the final release of 1.1.
• Customers who bought 1.0 will be entitled to a free version of 1.1 when it is officially released; these customers will be able to download a 1.1N version and be licensed to use this version.
• Customers will not automatically receive the 1.1 version in the mail. It will be up to the customer to download the new version from our home pages.
• Licensed 1.0 customers will be able to transfer whatever time remains of their 90 days of support to the 1.1 version once it is officially released.

• We will not be selling version 1.1 until it is officially released. However, if you purchase version 1.0 now you will be entitled to a free update to the final version of 1.1.
• We expect to release version 1.1 under the same terms and pricing as the 1.0 release, including a 1.1N release. You can find more information about ordering from our Netscape Store.

A number of new features were added as part of the version 1.1 product. These were based upon emerging standards and proposals. The new HTML tags are based upon the HTML 3.0 proposal. The HTTP additions are based upon discussions within the working group mailing list and the MIME standard. Netscape Communications Corporation is an active participant in all Web-related standard bodies and is a founding Full Member of the W3 Consortium. Please read our discussion of Netscape's commitment to open standards, if you're interested in more information.

Please be advised, however, that since HTML 3.0 is still an evolving proposal, some of the new tags supported in Netscape 1.1b1 may change before the final Netscape 1.1 release. We will support the syntax that is agreed upon for the final HTML 3.0 specification. This could mean that some of the tags which are supported in the beta will change between now and the final release as the standard evolves.

• Bug fixes: Many fixes since 1.0.

• Performance: Many operations should be faster. Going back to visited pages is now faster, because we've devoted 2/3 of the memory cache to decoded images.

• Tables: These are as defined in the current HTML 3.0 draft specification. For a demonstration of tables, click here.

• Backgrounds: ... and the ability to change text colors. For a demonstration, click here. Since Netscape 1.1a1, we've also improved the appearance of table bevels when they're over a background. Since Netscape 1.1a1, we've also changed the HTML tag for backgrounds. The demonstration pages will show you the new tag.

• User Defined Backgrounds: You can now specify a default background image, as well as background colors in the defaults file.

• Remote Control Mechanism: You can control Netscape from outside of the application. For more information, read Netscape Client APIs.

• Dynamic Documents: You can create documents whose contents are updated dynamically, either on a periodic basis or irregularly. See here for details.

• Popup Menu: A Popup menu with some key commands right at your fingertips. To see the pop-up menu on the Windows or X platform, hold down the right mouse button over the document area. On the Macintosh, hold down your mouse button for about 1 second to make the popup menu appear.

• ALT tags & Loading Images: We now show ALT text in images and allow you to load individual images when Auto Load Images is turned off. To load an image, click on the image replacement icon. To follow the image's link, click on the ALT text, or use the popup menu.

• Mail Sending & News Posting Improvements: A new Mail Message window that also includes News Posting capabilities and file attachments. Binary files that are mailed or posted use base64 encoding. Also, any quoted-printable encoding is correctly decoded by Netscape Navigator.

• Cache Bug: A bug in the cache was fixed which would sometimes cause Netscape to present out-of-date documents. After upgrading to 1.1b1 it is recommended that you flush your cache to flush the incorrect information saved by 1.0.

• Cache Preferences: There are several Preferences available, now, that refer to the Memory cache and the Disk cache. You can set the size of these caches through the Preferences window. A larger disk cache means that as you browse, files will be saved on your disk so that when you re-visit them, they are brought up from disk rather than from the network.

  In Netscape 1.0, when you asked for a document already in your cache, Netscape would always contact the original document server and ask for the document's header information, for comparison. This affected the performance of the cache. In 1.1, you can control this through the Cache preference: Verify Documents. If you set this to "Every Time", you will have the same behavior as in Netscape 1.0. "Once per session" means that the document is only checked the first time you use it in a particular Netscape session. "Never" means that the server is contacted only if the document's header information indicates that it has expired. For the best cache performance, use "Once per session".

• Security: The US version of the software now supports numerous cipher choices: RC4-40, RC4-128, RC2-40, RC2-128, DES-64, and DES-192. The cipher used in any particular document is displayed in the Document Information dialog box. The export version of the software, including version 1.0, supports only RC4-40.

• News Reading Improvements: Improvements to the News interface, including:
  • A new Preference to set the maximum number of articles to download and thread at a time: a low number will give much better performance over a modem line.
  • Improved presentation of newsgroups and articles.
  • MIME-compliant news articles will be presented according to their content type. (This means that news articles may contain HTML, or even encoded JPEG or GIF images. Messages of type multipart/mixed are also understood.)
  • Signature files are now supported in mail and in news.
  • Subscribing to groups on multiple news hosts is supported.

• Change in filenames: The names of the various Netscape dot-files have been changed. The first time you start 1.1b1 it should offer to rename your old files to the new names. No further action on your part should be necessary.

• External Viewer errors: Should an external viewer produce output to stdout or stderr, that information will be presented in a dialog box instead of being silently discarded.

• Compression and External Viewers: Documents encoded with `compress' or `gzip' will be correctly decoded before being displayed or handed to an external viewer.

• Selection & Dragging: Dragging the selection with the left mouse button will now scroll the document as necessary.

• -iconic: The -iconic command line option works again.

• Startup time: Startup time should be improved.

• Preference window: The preference window has been slightly rearranged.

• Netscape renames .MCOM-xxx files to .netscape-xxx files. If you have a .MCOM-cache directory for your disk cache files, you need to rename it by hand. When you start Netscape, check Option Menu - Preferences - Cache and Network to make sure your Disk Cache Directory is pointing to .netscape-cache

• The first bookmark in a list or header must be entered by hand. Go to the Bookmark Menu - View Bookmarks window to enter the first one. After that, you will be able to add them via the menus or hotkeys.

• On some platforms, Netscape crashes when you open a new window via the File Menu or the middle mouse.

• SaveAs with the text or postscript option will save your file as HTML source instead.

• Cancelling Printing can cause bus errors.

• In some cases, after you print a document, the N will still be animating and the cursor will still be a little watch, even though nothing is happening. Just press Escape, or Back or Forward or one of the directory buttons.

• The export version of Netscape 1.1 supports the RC4-40 cipher. Using the export version to connect to servers that support other ciphers should give you an error message saying that the cipher types don't match. In some cases, you will get a -12286 TCP error or no message at all.

• Our mail and news interface is new and is still experiencing some difficulties with multi-part MIME messages.

• You cannot select text across multiple rows and columns of a table.

• If you run the Solaris 2.3 binary on a 2.4 machine, and you look at pages on a secure server which has images, one or more of the images on the page may fail to complete loading.

Find out more about Netscape at info@netscape.com, or call 415/528-2225.
Copyright © 1995 Netscape Communications Corporation