From: Raph Levien <raph@cs.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 95 16:37:51 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Netscape 2.0 beta
Message-ID: <307860AB.167E@cs.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I just got Netscape 2.0 beta for DEC Alpha. Here are my initial
impressions:

* Still no Java support (for DEC Alpha) :-(.

* I saw no hints of S/MIME support. Did I miss something? Do the
  binaries for other platforms support S/MIME? I have access to HP, 
  and will probably demand a Sun account from the powers that be
  here, just so I can run Java. I _really_ want to test S/MIME.

* The mail reader facility looks pretty good. The smooth
  integration of MIME and HTML objects is really quite nice. On
  the other hand, there are a few UI quirks that will no doubt
  get ironed out over the coming months.

* The .mailcap parser _still_ doesn't recognize %{variable} style
  entries. Thus, I wasn't able to test Michael Elkins' PGP/MIME
  format for compatibility with Netscape. The %{} syntax is in
  the spec (RFC 1524), guys.

* To send mail, Netscape apparently connects to the SMTP server
  running on localhost. I haven't confirmed this. Thus, I don't
  see any way to integrate Netscape and premail :-(. Guess I'll
  just have to wait for Netscape script (from what I've seen so
  far, it's not possible in pure Java).

* No user-defined headers from mail :-(. Thus, I couldn't put an
  "In-Reply-To: " header in this followup.

* News is also not bad, but I find I can't zip through tons of
  low S/N newsgroups the way I can with trn. I tend to rate
  newsreaders in number of messages deleted per second. I think
  with a bit more tweaking on the UI, it could really sing.

* One slick feature of news is its ability to decode binary
  postings, apparently in both MIME and uuencode formats. However,
  I wasn't able to figure out how to decode multiparts.

* The UI render code has a number of cosmetic defects (possibly
  related to the DECness of my machine). One new one is that
  drag-and-drops leave the Bookmarks window in an inconsistent
  state, leading one to want to press ctrl-L :-).

   Overall, nicely done. Mozilla will clearly remain the standard
in Web browsers, for the next few months anyway.

Raph