Netscape Communicator Tutorial
Pratap Reddy

What is Netscape?

It is a browser designed to display your Web pages that are written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

Hardware and Software Requirements

Hardware:

To run Netscape Communicator you should have a computer with at least 16 MB RAM.

Netscape Communicator has four important components as listed below:

• Navigator
• Mail
• Discussion Groups (News Groups)
• Composer -- Web page editor

Why Netscape Communicator?

Through this version of Netscape you have access to:

• Mail
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• USENET News
• Netcaster
• Gopher
• Builtin HTML editor
• Also, it is Java capable
• and can handle frames

Free download of Netscape (For non-profit organizations)

Free Download

Let us examine some of the basic features of Netscape now. Netscape Navigator could be used not only to fetch HTML pages but also to do: e-mail ftp, telnet, gopher, netnews, java scripting. In order to use Netscape to do these functions you have to first configure your browser as shown on each link. To configure your Netscape Communicator Web browser, click on edit then preferences. If you want Mail & Groups, double click on it and proceed to configuration as shown on the screen shots below:

• Home Page Setup
• Mail/Groups Setup
• Identity Setup
• Server Setup
• News Setup

Netscape Communicator program could be used to do:

• Telnet URL: telnet://rvcc.raritanval.edu
• FTP URL ftp://preddy@rvcc.raritanval.edu (Where preddy = login name, you will be prompted for a password. For anonymous ftp omit the login name.)
• Usenet URL news:soc.culture.japan
• Gopher URL gopher://gopher.utexas.edu

Note: To retrieve your latest web page from the server press the shift key while clicking on "reload". Just clicking on the "reload" fetches your page from the disk cache.

You can invoke any of the communicator programs by clicking on the toolbar you find on the bottom right hand side of the Netscape Communicator. The toolbar looks as follows:

Once you are done using the communicator for e-mail, make sure to delete your e-mail messages from the hard drive. You could do this from the edit menu, then select message, then "all messages." Once all the messages are highlighted use the delete message option from the edit menu.