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3.3.6.1 Netscape Navigator

The founders of Netscape Communication Corp (formerly Mosaic Communication Corp) developed the first graphical WWW browser in 1993 (XMosaic). The currently released version of Netscape's browser is Netscape Navigator 3.0. It is the most widespread WWW browser on the market. In a recent press releases, Netscape claimed to have a browser usage of 50 million users. Microsoft reacted with an article on the WWW[*] in which they wrote that, according to a study by Zona Research (``Internet and Intranet 1996: Markets, Opportunities, and Trends'', 1996), the entire World Wide WWW browsers installed base is 37 million browsers, about 75% of which used Netscape Navigator. Unfortunately, numbers in this area are out of date as soon as they are announced.

Netscape Navigator is available on many platforms. There are versions for Microsoft Windows (16 bit and 32 bit), Apple Macintosh, and for various UNIX systems. With respect to Java support, you should not rely on platform independence (see Chapter 5.3.1). Netscape Navigator is an easy to use graphical WWW browser. Some features of Netscape Navigator include:

  • History, hierarchical bookmarks, and caching

  • Multimedia (Images, Live Audio, Live Video, Live 3D (VRML), Quicktime (Apple's Video));

  • Communication (Email, News, Cooltalk (Internet phone), FTP);

  • Full HTML support;

  • CGI script and Java support;

  • JavaScript support (JavaScript is a C++ style scripting language, developed by Netscape, which has nothing to do with Java0;

  • Proxy support;

  • Security (Netscape's Secure Socket Layer (SSL) provides a means for secure protocol-independent (Telnet, HTTP, email, etc.) exchange of information between two applications. SSL enables both server and user authentification [LP96].

  • Plug-ins (third party applications which can be embedded into Netscape Navigator);

  • HTML authoring with Netscape Navigator Gold;

This list does not claim to be complete, and by the time you read this, there will probably more additional features since Netscape is launching a new version of their browser nearly every second month. The latest available product is the pre-release of Netscape Communicator for Windows NT/95, a package of browsing, communication, collaboration, and authoring tools.