General comments on which Browser to use
The market is currently dominated by Netscape and Microsoft, each
currently offering Version 4 and soon to offer version 5 of their
browsers.
This comes in two versions. Navigator is the pure browser component
and is the version we recommend for reading this conference if your
computer is limited in memory. Navigator is available for three
platforms (Windows, MacOS and Unix). The current release is version
4.05 (April 1998). Earlier versons of 4.0X are not recommended, and
in particular V 4.05 fixes some serious printing bugs present in
earlier versions of release 4. The much earlier version 3.04 is
however quite acceptable and in some instances may even prove less
prone to crashing than V 4.05. Communicator V 4.05 is a bundle of
several components, including an email client called Messenger and
an HTML authoring tool called Composer. The latter is a good tool
for creating articles for submission to the conference, although
many other utilities are also
available for this purpose. Many people might prefer to use
their own email client (e.g
Eudora etc) for sending and receiving email. Note however that
Netscape Messenger has the advantage that it can make use of
e.g. the Chemscape Chime™ plug-in to directly view any
molecular data files sent as an email enclosure.
To tune Netscape for browsing this conference, check the
following
- It is advisable on a Macintosh to increase the Memory partion
of the browser application by about 2-4 Mbytes above the
default.
- Many of the conference pages have embedded molecular data. To
be able to view this, you need to install a molecular viewer such
as Chemscape Chime™ in the form of a browser plug-in. Version
1.0 of the Chime installer is
distributed by MDL Information systems and will normally detect
the presence of the Netscape browser and install all the required
software in the correct folder. Version 2.0 of Chime is currently
in beta test.
- If you wish to use the embedded e-mail addresses to be found in
various documents, you will have to use either Netscape Navigator V
3.04 or Netscape Communicator V 4.05. Navigator V 4.05 does not
support electronic mail. You will also have to set all the
email preferences in Netscape. You might want to choose the "leave
mail on server" option so that you you can re-read any incoming
mail using any alternative preferred email client at another
time.
- Using any version of Netscape, you should also check that
options for enabling JavaScript and Java are set on (this is
normally the default option). In V 3.03, these settings can be
found in the Options/Network Preferences/Languages pull-down menu.
In V 4.05 they are found in the Edit/Preferences/Advanced pull-down
menu.
As with Netscape, Version 4.0a of Internet Explorer (IE) comes with
a separate Web client and Email client (Outlook Express 4.0) which
are configured separately. These are available for both Windows and
Macintosh platforms, but not for Unix systems.
Although IE for Windows does support the Chemscape Chime™
plug-in to view embedded molecular content, it only does so in an
easily configurable, and stable manner with Version 2.0 of Chime.
It is not recommended that Version 1.0 of Chime is used with this
browser. Currently (March 1998) Chime 2.0 is only available for
Windows platforms, although a release for the Macintosh is expected
shortly. Instructions for configuring IE with Chime 2.0 for Windows
platforms will appear here shortly. It is not expected that a
version of IE for Macintosh suitable for use with Chime 2.0 will be
available in the near future.
