PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY : Hints for Navigating Netscape
For some time now, Netscape Navigator has been the browser of choice for surfing the World Wide Web. Netscape, as it’s called for short, rose to prominence because of its performance, and now a great many Web pages are optimized for it.
But many Netscape Navigator users aren’t fully aware of all the neat things it can do for you. This week I’d like to share a few tips that make my life online a little easier using this powerful program. (Like most of what I write, these are largely aimed at Windows users, though many of the tips will apply to Macintosh users too.)
Some of the coolest things you can do with Netscape have to do with its Bookmarks feature. If you just pull down Bookmarks and choose Go to Bookmarks (or just hit Control B), you’ll get a Bookmarks window.
Pull down File, click What’s New? and Netscape offers to check in with any or all of your Boomarked sites to see if they’ve changed since your last visit. It’s fast, too. What’s New is a great way to quickly see what’s happening on your favorite sites without laboriously visiting each.
Another useful tip for Netscape users is to change your default home page to something more useful than Netscape’s own home page, which you can always reach by clicking on the big white N in the upper right of the Netscape window.
Before I explain how to do this, let’s first decide what our default home page should be. One possibility is something like https://www.yahoo.com, if you often use the Yahoo index. Or you can even start with a blank page.
My preference is to turn my Bookmark file into my default home page. See, Netscape stores Bookmarks in a file called BOOKMARK.HTM in your Netscape subdirectory (or folder, depending on which operating system you’re using). Note the “.HTM” part of that name. It means the file contains hypertext markup language, special text characters that serve as instructions understood by Web browsers.
Moreover, Web pages needn’t be out in cyberspace in order for Netscape to view them; pages on your very own hard drive work best of all. To prove this, launch Netscape Navigator, hit Control O for Open File and click your way to the Netscape Navigator subdirectory, where you’ll see BOOKMARK.HTM. It resembles any other Web page, without the fancy graphics. Your bookmark entries will appear as familiar hot links, probably in underlined blue or red lettering.
Using your mouse, go up to the “Location” field and select the text there. (It’s the full path name of the Bookmark file.) Copy it to the Clipboard. Now pull down the Options menu item at the top of the screen, click General Preferences and choose the Appearance tab.
You can change your home page here. Just click “Start With Home Page Location” and paste the Clipboard contents into the field. Click OK, close Netscape, reopen it and, voila, your Bookmarks page comes up as your home page. Now you can easily see what’s what and go straight to where you want to go.
One caution: New Bookmarks you create may not appear right away because of a strange bug recently discovered in Netscape Navigator. If your PC automatically takes into account daylight saving time--most newer ones do--then Netscape doesn’t display the latest version of a Web page accessed twice within an hour.
This has to do with the way Netscape saves recently opened pages in a special “cache” on your hard drive. To view the most recent changes, clear this cache, which you can do by pulling down Options and choosing Network Preferences.
Another tip for using Netscape Navigator 2.0 (the Windows 95 version) is to make more use of the right mouse button.
For instance, let’s say you come across a link you want to check out, or even some software you want to download. You can right click and use the “open in new browser” command. It will load into a new window of Netscape, independently of the first. You can keep reading or browsing there while waiting for the other to fill in.
Another thing you can do with the right mouse in Netscape 2.0 is create a desktop shortcut to a Web page. Just right click and use Internet shortcuts, or left click and drag a hot link onto your desktop.
Remember that with Netscape you don’t have to type in the entire Web address to reach a home page on the Internet. Just type in the domain name--for instance, microsoft.com, or even just microsoft--and Netscape will fill in https://www.microsoft.com.
A few other handy Netscape tips:
* If you have any interest in creating Web pages, try the Document Source command under the View menu. You can use it to view the underlying HTML of a Web page. You can even use the Clipboard to cut and paste HTML code you want to copy. Also try Document Info, which reveals the structure of the document. * You can use Netscape not just for surfing the Web, but for reading news and e-mail (just look under the Window pull-down), and also for gopher and FTP. In other words, it can be a unified interface to the Internet. To use for gopher, just type in the name of the gopher site--for example, gopher.usc.edu yields the site. FTP works the same way. If gopher or FTP aren’t part of the address, insert them in place of http, with the usual colon and slashes.
* One supposed improvement in Netscape 2.0 is that it permits Web page designers to use all kinds of backgrounds on their pages. If you find that these are making a page illegible, pull down the Options menu, click General, choose Colors and click “always use my colors, overriding document.”
* Daniel Akst welcomes messages at dan.akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.well.com/~akst/.
