IP-TEC - Infopeople Technical Service Archive: Netscape Tips

Netscape Tips

Carole Leita (leita@netcom.com)
Thu, 7 Mar 1996 11:16:13 -0800

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, learning as much as I can about
Netscape, and thought I might, to quote Ranganathan's Fourth Law, "Save the
time of the reader" by sharing some of what I've read with our Infopeople
project members. Do let me know if this is useful?

Carole
______________________________________________________________
Carole Leita, leita@netcom.com
Internet/Reference Librarian, 510-644-6100 ext.313
Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St., Berkeley CA 94703
URL: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/bpl/
______________________________________________________________

>From http://itrc.on.ca/~jason/sober7/sober7_3.html
An interesting web magazine with tips like the following

While reading a document in Netscape the Stop button on the tool bar is
the slow way to abort an HTTP request. The keyboard commands work much
faster, and if you use a 14.4 you need all the speed you can get. Use Esc
on PC's, and Command "." [period] on Macs.

In the "Just when you thought you had the latest and greatest" category:

Tuesday, March 5, 1996
Section: Business
Page: 1E

By: By LEE GOMES, Mercury News Staff Writer

An outbreak of bugs in a supposedly highly secure feature of Netscape
Communications Corp.'s Internet software is forcing the Mountain View
company to scramble and issue a new version of its flagship ''Navigator''
program, even though the current one is just four weeks old.

By taking advantage of various loopholes in Netscape's JavaScript control
language, computer specialists studying the product have found ways in
which a World Wide Web page could, if so designed, surreptitiously
discover what files exist on an individual user's hard disk drive.

A separate bug allows a Web page to force a user's machine to send an
e-mail to another designated computer. Such a message would, at the very
least, contain the user's e-mail address. Again, this major violation of
Internet privacy would occur unbeknownst to the user.

--snip--

Netscape said Monday that it will release a new version of Navigator, to
be called version 2.01, in the next week or so. Not only will the new
version deal with the specific issues that have been raised, said
Netscape's Brendan Eich, it also will allow users to turn off JavaScript
entirely, something they can now do only to Java.

--snip--

Security experts say the problems being seen with JavaScript and Java are
just a taste of things to come. A new category of Internet programs,
called ''plug-ins,'' are basically traditional PC programs rewritten to
run on the Web, and they sometimes don't address rudimentary security
matters.

--snip--