NetPositive
was the BeOS-native Web browser, but yellowTAB recommend users to
go for Firebird or Mozilla. The NetPositive browser has not been
updated for some years, and will therefore fail to present many
web sites. It will for instance not show yellowTAB's own web site
correctly, but it is on the other hand idle for this manual.
Many BeOS-users will probably continue using this browser, as it
is one of the fastest browsers ever made. It launches on most machines
in less then a second, pulls previously loaded pages and images
out of its cache in a lightning speed, and starts rendering most
Web pages almost immediately.
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The text field near the top of the window shows the URL of the
current page; type a new URL into this field and press ENTER to
go to that site.
In the toolbar you will find the following buttons: Back and forward,
stop the page being downloaded, reload the current page, go to your
favourite search engine, go to your default home page, and open
the file download status window. The icons for search engine and
home page are not displayed until their locations are set in the
Preferences.
The area at the very bottom of the window displays a keyhole icon
when you are entering a secure site, and describes the status of
the current page download ("Opening...", Loading Text...",
etc.), or the address of the link the cursor is pointing to.
NetPositive Preferences
General Preferences
Home
Page
Set this to the URL or domain name that's opened by default
when you launch NetPositive.
The default Home Page is built in to the browser it self, and contains
links to BeOS resources, both on your own hard drive and on the
Web.
Search Page
Specify your favourite search engine. To go to the search
engine, click the flashlight button in the browser window. The default
search engine is Google.
Download
Directory
Set this to the folder where you want your Web downloads to
go. We recommend you to keep the default setting: /boot/home/Downloads.
For those of you that switch between using Firebird
and NetPositive, we recommend you to use the same download folder
for both applications.
New windows
This menu lets you specify what should happen when you open
a new window. The new window can open the same page that's open
in the current window (Clone current window), it can open the Home
Page, or open a blank page.
When a new cookie is received
A cookie contains personalized data, such as a shopping cart,
or login information, that a server stores on your computer. You
can choose to Accept all cookies, Reject them, or
Ask to be notified when a cookie is being downloaded.
Automatically launch...
When a file is downloaded, it will be automatically opened if
this checkbox is checked.
Number of days...
The Go menu saves recent links so you can return them
easily. How long it saves them depends on the settings.
Display Preferences
For the encoding
Associates the font settings (displayed immediately beneath)
with the given character encoding. In addition to Western,
you can also make font settings for Unicode, Japanese,
Greek, Cyrillic and Central European.
You apply an encoding to a page through the browser window's View
menu.
The checkboxes in the bottom half of the panel are mostly self-documenting.
Connection Preferences
Check Enable Proxies if you have a proxy server for special
caching, or possibly for security reasons if you have a firewall
- if you want to run your Web connections through a different server
than the one you're actually connecting on.
To set this preference fill in either a host name or IP address
for HTTP and / or FTP. The FTP proxy should point
to an HTTP proxy, since NetPositive only understands how proxy through
http.
Max...connections
Lets you set the maximum number of simultaneous Internet connections
to make from one window. If you're using a modem or running on slow
hardware, you may want to set this to a low number to improve perceived
performance.
Cache Preferences
Cache Location
Lets you set the location of the "cache"; this is where
NetPositive stores pages and images (but not files) that
it downloads. Whenever you click on a new Web page, NetPositive
looks to see if that page (or any of its images) are already in
the same cache. If they are, the cached pages are display instead
of downloading new ones. The cache's default location is shown here.
Refresh cache
Tells NetPositive how often it should check to see if the pages
in the cache have grown "stale". If a page in the cache
is out-of-sync with its "real" version (on the server
that served the page) the cached version is thrown away.
Leave Cache Size at the 10 MB default, unless you're really
squeezed for disk space. Set larger cache if you're a heavy browser.
Clear Now
The button deletes all the files currently in the cache.
The cache can also be cleared with the FilWip
application.
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