• 6
• Webmaster's Guide to Explorer and Navigator
• A Quick Guide to Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Netscape Navigator
• What's Next?

6

Webmaster's Guide to Explorer and Navigator

• A Quick Guide to Microsoft Internet Explorer
  
  
• Netscape Navigator
  
  

In addition to serving the Web, a Webmaster obviously needs to browse the Web too. We hope you won't feel that this is too basic a subject for a book about building a Web server. Perhaps it is; but we thought it might be a good idea to take a quick look at some of the features offered by these two popular browsers for Windows 95. We promise to keep it short because we do have more interesting things to get to. If you are already familiar with using your browser, by all means skip or skim this chapter.

A Quick Guide to Microsoft Internet Explorer

If you installed Microsoft Internet Explorer from the Microsoft Plus Pack, you'll probably want to reinstall it from the CD that comes with this book. That's because this CD includes version 2.0. Best of all—it's free!

Some of the features in the new version of Internet Explorer are a new newsreader, support for VRML (they call it ActiveVRML), 32-bit code optimized for multi-threading on Windows 95, support for HTML 3.0 tags, and support for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

Here are the steps to install Microsoft Internet Explorer:

1. Copy the file msie20dl.exe from the CD to the \temp directory on your hard drive. Double-click the file to cause it to self-install.
   
   
2. After the Internet Explorer Installation Kit is finished copying files, it will ask you to reboot to complete the process.
   
   
3. After rebooting, double-click the new icon you have on your desktop that is labeled The Internet. The first time you run this it will walk you through a wizard to configure your Internet access. If you worked through Chapter 4 then the Dial-Up Networking information is already saved for you. But you still have to click all the way through the wizard in order to get to the Microsoft Internet Explorer. When you finish the wizard, you should see the Internet Explorer, as shown in Figure 6.1.
   
   

Figure 6.1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 viewing the MSN home page.

One of the cool features about Explorer is its capability to send e-mail that contains an embedded link to a Web page. This is because of its tight integration with the OLE features of Windows 95. For example, suppose you are visiting an interesting page several levels down at Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) and you would like to send me a message to check it out. If you know my e-mail address and if you know that I'm running Windows 95, all you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Choose File | Send from the Internet Explorer menu. The first time you try this, it will open the dialog shown in Figure 6.2. This dialog asks you to choose an e-mail profile to use for the message.
   
   Figure 6.2. Explorer 2.0's e-mail profile dialog.
   


2. Select Exchange Settings, choose the Options button, turn on the checkbox for Set As Default Profile, and choose the OK button. Next time it won't bother you with the Profile question. Now it may take several seconds to load the Microsoft Exchange New Message dialog.
   
   
3. Notice that the message body includes an icon with the title of the Web page you were visiting. Fill out the subject and the recipient address for the new message and select File/Send from the menu. Your message is on its way. The cool part is that the recipient can double-click on the icon to automatically invoke his or her Web browser and go to the same Web page!
   
   

Microsoft has recently released Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows 3.1 and the Macintosh, in addition to the version on the CD with this book which is for Windows 95.

Netscape Navigator

You might have heard about the Wall Street craze over Netscape. The reason for all the excitement is that Netscape currently has a very big lead in the popularity race for the best browser on the Internet.

You might think that if Microsoft Internet Explorer is a free product, few people would want to pay for Netscape Navigator. As we write this, Netscape is just finishing a long beta program on Version 2.0 of their new browser. They too have been giving away the beta version of their browser for the past several months. That should change, however, by the time this book hits the streets as Netscape will begin trying to sell Navigator Version 2.0. Will people buy it? That is the billion-dollar question.

There are many reasons that most experts think Navigator will probably succeed. Here are just a few:

• It contains the de facto and best implementation of HTML 3.0. This is because Netscape has consistently lead the way in proposing and implementing new and useful HTML enhancements. Navigator also includes several extensions that aren't even in the proposed standard for HTML 3.0. Some Webmasters on the Internet are already advertising their home pages as being Netscape-enhanced beyond the point of backward-compatibility with other browsers. (See Chapter 12 for more information about the Netscape Extensions to HTML.)
  
  
• Navigator already includes support for Java. Microsoft Internet Explorer probably won't have this feature for several months.
  
  
• Navigator is truly a second-generation Web browser and has already been running on other operating systems for more than a year.
  
  
• In addition to HTML 3.0 and Java, Navigator includes support for e-mail, newsgroups, FTP, and VRML. (Did we mention Java? That's the one everybody is talking about.)
  
  

We don't really need to talk about setting up Navigator 2.0 because it will be sold as a commercial product. If you decide to purchase Navigator 2.0, it will include a setup program and proper instructions on how to configure it.

We will be talking about the Netscape extensions quite a bit throughout this book, and many of the figures depict Navigator. However, you do not need to run Netscape to take advantage of this book. While we both spend a lot of time using Navigator, we can tell you that Microsoft Internet Explorer is also a very capable Web browser. Once again, it is up to you to choose the right application that you feel the most comfortable with.

What's Next?

Two other common tasks of the Webmaster are Internet file transfers and researching the newsgroups. In the next chapter we will discuss the tools you need to carry out these tasks with ease.