HotJava Browser 1.0 Features

Customizable

The HotJava Browser conforms to Web standards and standard practice. It is designed to be highly scalable and customizable, enabling end-users, service providers and intranet providers to easily tailor it to meet their specific requirements. Like Web pages themselves, the user interface of the HotJava Browser is implemented by HTML and applets, whose behavior can be modified by an ASCII-based properties file.

Extensible

Unlike other browsers, HotJava can download and execute applets even behind corporate firewalls. You can extend the browser's capability dynamically, without increasing its base memory footprint, by installing new content and protocol handlers for it to use for new media types or protocols. This makes the HotJava Browser an ideal, scalable solution for the new class of network devices, such as Network Computers.

Improved Applet Security

The HotJava Browser uses the Java Security Manager to provide safe execution of Java applets, independent of the host from which they're downloaded. New in the HotJava Browser 1.0 is support for signed applets. This adds dramatic new flexibility to the original Java built-in security capabilites. The HotJava Browser can now allow an applet more or less access to local system resources based on the applet's signature, as the signature can include the source of the applet, the userid of who created it, the name of the originating host, and so on. The browser can also now verify that an applet was not modified between the time it was signed and received. The HotJava Browser allows administrators to tune security by restricting the access capabilities of applets, to easily control which applets can be downloaded, and to control the system files that an applet can read or write to. (By default, an applet cannot inspect or change files in any way.) The HotJava Browser also supports HTTP authentication, providing access to password-protected Web sites.

SSL Support (U.S. Domestic Release)

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is an open protocol for securing data communications across computer networks. This protocol is supported by many vendors, and is being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The HotJava Browser now incorporates SSL version 3.0 support, and can now connect to a site using HTTPS, allowing for a secure connection between browser and the secure server. This is frequently used for electronic commerce applications and in situations where browsers and servers need to communicate either privately, or with assurance about the identity of who is on either end of the communication. The HotJava Browser also supports SSL tunneling through firewalls, so that it can be used from within corporate internets to access external secured sites such as employee brokerages and banks. In addition, you can now give the HotJava Browser permission to automatically accept secure (SSL) connections from any site that uses a particular certificate, or from any site that uses certificates issued by a particular certificate authority.

Optionally Flexible HTML Parser

On the basis of a property, the user can choose to have the parsing of the HTML pages be very strict or more forgiving. In the more forgiving mode, the parser flags HTML syntax errors, and attempts to recover gracefully from them to faithfully reproduce the page's content as the author expects. This is most useful for users navigating others' Web pages that may have buggy HTML code. The more strict mode is useful for developing your own Web page; it can help alert you to HTML errors in your page.

Internationalization

The HotJava Browser now supports the Unicode 2.0 character set. Using available system fonts, the HotJava Browser can now display both Latin and non-Latin Unicode characters including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. In addition, all user visible messages are stored in an easy-to-modify plain text file, and much of the browser's user interface is defined using HTML, making localization or customization for particular markets a breeze.

Tables and Frames

The HotJava Browser now supports both Tables and Frames. To see this, you can visit Moneynet at http://www.moneynet.com or TechWire at http://www.techweb.com/wire. (Note that you may need to set proxy servers before you can access these or other remote pages. Use the HotJava Edit->Preferences->Proxies page to do so.)

Supported Internet Standards

The HotJava Browser 1.0 release supports the following Internet standards and practices:

Complete Feature List

The HotJava Browser 1.0 feature list includes:
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