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Configuring Netscape on UNIX

Presented by David Cantrell on March 18, 2002

Table of Contents


1. Introduction

Everyone has used Netscape and everyone seems to share the same waffling opinion.
I hear, "I hate it!" and "It’s great!" from the same people…sometimes even in the same
day. While Netscape on UNIX can leave a bit to be desired in terms of the quick end-
user experience, it is a reasonable browser and is often times needed for some
applications.

I use Netscape on UNIX more than any other browser, but I also switch between
Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and OmniWeb. I have not found a perfect browser
and I don’t think one will ever exist. Netscape irritates me the least, probably because
I’ve been using it the longest. If you’re cringing right now, then what I’m about to
explain may be what you’re looking for. If you’re ever forced into using a system with
only one browser and that browser is Netscape, then the information provided in this
document could prove to be useful at some point in the future.


2. Getting Netscape

If you lack Netscape, you can get the latest release from ftp.netscape.com in the
/pub/communicator directory.


3. Understanding Netscape on UNIX

The UNIX version of Netscape was originally written for IRIX. After that initial release, it was eventually ported to other UNIX
platforms as the need arose. Unfortunately, each UNIX system is slightly different than
the other, making for a common code base between them all being close to impossible.
You need to understand the time period when this was all happening and that we had
no GTK+ and we didn’t have Qt, and Linux wasn’t even really usable yet. We have to
make mistakes to move forward.

With that in mind, Netscape settled on the 1.2 version of Motif. It worked across all the
UNIX platforms they wanted to support and it cut down on development time because
they did not have to create a new toolkit. In addition, many vendors were already
shipping Motif 1.2 or were on the verge of doing so, with the advancement of CDE
across most major UNIX operating systems. By choosing Motif, Netscape would (in
theory) be welcomed into the CDE world if it looked and acted like other CDE programs.

The choice of Motif for the Netscape on UNIX toolkit made supporting Linux rather
difficult. Since Motif costs money, they could not assume people would have it. So the
only real choice was to statically link Netscape on Linux with Motif. This is one of the
big reasons why it is so slow on Linux. If you use Netscape on IRIX or Solaris, where a
dynamically linked version is available, you will notice a slightly more responsive UI.

So, it is a Motif program and works like most other Motif 1.2 applications. Most people
on Linux first experience Motif under Netscape, which is probably bad because Motif is
a nice toolkit to work with. Lastly, Motif suffers from something that cannot be
corrected: it’s ugly. So, we just create new less-ugly toolkits and move on to using
those. Even still, Motif will have to remain a staple of most commercial UNIX operating
systems because it is so well established in that user base. Netscape Communicator
will continue to use Motif, but the newer Netscape releases based on Mozilla have
moved to using GTK+ on the UNIX platform. A bit slower, but a little nicer and more
"current".

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Netscape does not behave like a normal X application. This
is good and bad, so I won’t bother arguing either side there. Just understand that it
doesn’t respond to normal X command line options, but it does support useful options
that give you essentially the same type functionality (some are even unique to Netscape
and browsing in general). Remember that Netscape on UNIX works across many UNIX
platforms, so trying to conform to each of those standards would have been more time
consuming than settling on a standard across all the Netscape versions.


4. Configuring Netscape

Netscape makes use of X resources as well as its own custom configuration file. More
things can be configured via the custom file, but X resources usually provide a quick
and easy way to change a setting. First, I’ll explain X resources:


4.1. X resources

The .Xdefaults file in your home directory holds X resources for any applications
that support them. You may already have X resources for XTerm or a similar
program. The format of an X resource is:

Program*resource: value

For a listing of pretty much all possible X resources for Netscape, have a look at
the Netscape.ad file in your Netscape program directory (probably
/usr/lib/netscape, /usr/local/netscape, or /opt/netscape). This file has all the
Netscape X resources complete with comments and possible values.

With that in mind, here are some handy X resource settings for customizing
Netscape. Put these in your ~/.Xdefaults file:

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