CSE 457
Introduction to Computer Graphics
1998 Winter Quarter

Help

Basic help

Point. Click. Repeat until sufficiently bored. You'll find more in-depth help on the Help menu of your browser.

Why does the page look so weird?

The CSE457 home page uses tables, a feature that is best supported by Netscape. Mosaic tends to completely leave out any table entries containing links, and occasionally even seg-faults. We used to support a page that did not have any tables. However, now we feel that tables are common enough that no one should run into problems.

Mosaic, Netscape, Lynx -- what's the difference?

Mosaic was the original graphical web browser, created by Marc Andreesen and others at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne. After graduating, though, most of the team that created Mosaic created the company that is now Netscape Communications.

So what's the difference between the two? Well, Mosaic is still being (slowly) worked on at UIUC. Netscape, on the other hand, has been screaming ahead in technology. Universities tend to support Mosaic, because it is free, and the source is distributed, so it can compile on obscure and obsolete operating systems (eg Ultrix). Netscape gives their products away to educational institutions for free, but usually users have to install and support it themselves.

Netscape is considered "faster" because it displays a page as it loads. With Mosaic, you have to wait until the entire page is loaded. Netscape also supports a larger set of formatting tags as well as including support for email and newsgroup reading, as well as extensions to support advanced technologies such as Macromedia Director, Adobe Acrobat, Sun's Java, and more.

Netscape also works better with color. It uses 24-bit color if available, whereas Mosaic is limited to 8-bit color. This is one of the main reasons we suggest you use Netscape for CSE457.

What about Lynx? Lynx is a text-based web browser. It isn't very exciting, but it can be useful if you can't support graphics -- like if you are dialing in from home and not using a SLIP/PPP connection. More information on all three can be found on these pages:

Using Netscape on the Indys

Though Netscape isn't officially supported in the IndyLab, we have a copy for you to use. This can be found at /cse/courses/cse457/bin/netscape. You might want to make an alias, or include /cse/courses/cse457/bin/ in your path list.

You'll need to set up one thing in Netscape so that you can use helper applications (eg sound-players, movie-players, installer-scripts, etc.). Under the Options menu select Preferences. Change the options-menu to Helper Applications. Then simply change the word netscape (after Global Types File and Global Mailcap File) to mosaic.

More help

If you need any additional help, try the help menu on your browser. Or, ask one of the TAs for help.