Netscape Communicator Release and Installation Notes

General Netscape limitations

The following notes describe issues specific to the UnixWare 7 platform as excerpted from the general Netscape release notes. For the entire document, see Communicator 4.61 Release Notes.

In addition, you can search for known problems with Communicator at the Netscape Netcenter.

IMAP
Certain servers (i.e., University of Washington) may prevent you from renaming or deleting subscribed mail folders if you have specified that deleted messages should be automatically moved to the Trash folder. If you try to delete a mail folder and then see an error message that the command failed, you should choose Subscribe from the File menu, and then unsubscribe your Trash folder.

If you change your user name on an IMAP server, you need to restart Communicator for the name change to take effect.

If you are using IMAP mail and would like your Sent, Templates, or Drafts folders to be located on your IMAP server, first create the folder on the server, then use Communicator Preferences to specify that you want Sent, Templates, or Drafts folders to be kept on the IMAP server.

To copy messages from one IMAP server to another, use the File toolbar button. You cannot drag and drop of messages from one IMAP server to another.

If you delete your only IMAP server and then add a POP server, Communicator may quit.

In order to create an IMAP container folder on servers that do not support folders containing both messages and subfolders, the folder should be created with a trailing slash, e.g., "toplevel/".

Exported certificate names
Exported certificate names are appended with either letters or numbers. Communicator doesn't check for duplicate names, so make sure to use a unique name for each certificate.

CSS objects in HTML files
Composer doesn't properly handle existing HTML files that contain CSS objects -- they may be removed from the file.

Zero-length cert7.db files
A zero length cert7.db file in the profile directory can cause Communicator to crash at startup. To avoid this, delete the zero length cert7.dbfile from the profile directory.

Roaming access
When using a slow connection, be patient with the progress dialog boxes. Sometimes they don't immediately respond to your input during file transfers.

If you choose not to transfer your preferences, Communicator does not transfer your address book and IMAP mail filters, which are stored with preferences.

Mail, address books, and pinpoint addressing
Certain IMAP servers cause an error when a mail message is moved from a subfolder to the Inbox. The workaround is to first file the message in a top-level folder, and then move the file to the Inbox.

If you are upgrading from Navigator 3.0x, you need to manually import your 3.0x address book into Communicator 4.61 by opening the address book window and choosing Import under the File menu.

Removing ns_imap folders causes Communicator to lose the mail filters you have set up. If you suspect corrupted mail summary files, be sure to just remove the files, not entire folders or directories.

Communicator 4.61 allows you to create multiple address books. Pinpoint addressing searches the first 15 address books in your address book window. If you have more than 15 address books, you can select the 15 you want to use by re-ordering them in the address book window.

Pinpoint addressing in Communicator 4.61 searches for matches against the display name, last name, email address and nickname. Communicator 4.0x gave precedence to nickname matches. If you want exact matches against a nickname to have precedence over matches against the other fields, add this line to your javascript preferences file:

   user_pref("ldap_2.autoComplete.nicknameHasPrecedence", true);
If you have an LDIF file representing an address book that was generated from Communicator 4.0x and contains 8-bit data, you can correctly import the 8-bit data into Communicator 4.61 by changing the file extension of your LDIF file to .4ld. Then, import the LDIF file like you normally would, using this new extension. You only need to do this if the file with 8-bit data was generated from a previous version of Communicator.

"Department," "URL," and "Prefers to receive rich text (HTML) mail" values are not exported/imported with CVS and TXT format.

Navigator
Some HTTP proxy servers don't support Internet Keywords when the user supplies only one keyword, instead giving the error Could Not Find Host.

When Communicator updates a page, either through the Reload button or a meta tag, it checks for changes in HTML descriptions, but doesn't check check for changes within individual elements on the page. Because the HTML description of an image can remain the same even after the content of the image is updated, there may be applications, such as a webcam, for which you want to "force" an update. To force the update of individual elements on a page, you can use meta tags:

   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="60">

By default, when saving from an FTP server in Navigator, Communicator saves binary files as HTML files.

International
If you usually attach vCards (Personal Cards) that contain 8-bit characters (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean) to your outgoing mail messages, we strongly recommend that you follow these suggestions when creating your vCard:

ISO 8859-15 charset support has been added to Xterm in order to provide euro support for Unix. This charset support currently is not available on Windows and Mac OS.

Some email sender applications use "UNKNOWN" as the charset name in the MIME2-encoded subject field. In such cases, Communicator uses the global default (which is set by View->Character Set->Set Default Character Set) as a reasonable guess.

When using the User Profile Manager to create a new profile, some Japanese characters that you enter in the Profile Name field of the "Choose a Name and Directory for Your Profile" dialog don't appear correctly in the directory. To correct the directory entry, delete the directory name and manually type the correct Japanese characters.

Java and JavaScript
JavaScript 1.3 contains an ECMA-compliant fix regarding assignments such that if (a=b) is no longer interpreted as if (a==b). You can update the code or, if you want the old behavior, specify:
   <SCRIPT language="JavaScript1.2">.

If you use an applet that uses RMI callbacks, you must call netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalConnect") before your first call into the RMI runtime. Changes to Java classes have been made to improve security and simplify internal use of the reflection API.

You should set the CLASSPATH environment variable only if you need to install special Java files in Communicator. Communicator uses CLASSPATH to find local .class files. If CLASSPATH is set in the user's environment, only the .jar files and directories specified in the CLASSPATH are searched. If you set your CLASSPATH variable, you need to make sure that each .jar file in $MOZILLA_HOME/java/classes is listed individually in your CLASSPATH.

A previous workaround for UNIX systems, to avoid the freezing on startup of the edit or compose window, has been changed. If you previously set editor.disable_spell_checker in the preferences.js file, you can now implement the improved fix by deleting this line from the preferences.js file:

   user_pref("editor.disable_spell_checker", true);
Replace it with this line:
   user_pref("editor.dont_lock_spell_files", true)
This preference setting prevents the spell checker from locking files over NFS, thereby preventing the window freezing problem.

If Communicator exhibits consistent problems on pages containing Javascript, check your ~/.mailcap file, and remove this line if it is in that file:

   application/x-javascript;;\
   x-mozilla-flags=save

If you register a mime handler for 'application/x-javascript,' errors occur when you attempt to display pages that have that mimetype. For example, if you use the Navigator Applications preference to add a new mimetype for 'application/x-javascript,' then choose Save To Disk, a core dump error occurs when you display pages containing that mimetype.

Graphics
The DirectColor visual class is no longer supported. If you specify a DirectColor visual with the -visual argument, or connect to an X server which implements DirectColor as the default visual class, Communicator uses a TrueColor visual instead.

If you receive Motif warnings that appear as dialog boxes, you can send those warnings to the command line instead by adding these lines to the file ~/.Xresources:

   Netscape*useStdoutDialog:False
   Netscape*useStderrDialog:False

Mail
If this is the very first time you've run any version of Communicator on your system, start Communicator, then exit, then start Communicator again before you use Messenger to access your mail. If you attempt to use Messenger the very first time you run Communicator, it may quit with an "Illegal instruction" message.

Help
In the Help window: The Index "look for:" field is small and it might be difficult to read, however when you type a word and press Enter, matching topics do appear. You can also scroll through the index entries.

TMPDIR environment
Communicator does not heed the TMPDIR environment variable when creating temporary files.

© 1999 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All rights reserved.