Troubleshooting

Look here for answers to questions about problems you may have.

Why can't I access web sites outside my company network?
Your company network firewall could be preventing you from making connections, especially if you haven't configured your proxy servers. Choose General Preferences from the Edit menu, then select Proxies from the list on the left side of the General Preferences dialog box. Contact your system administrator for the proxy information specific to your site.

Do not fill out the SOCKS fields on the Proxies panel if you do not have a SOCKS server, or &browser.name; won't be able to connect outside your firewall.

For more information, see &browser.name; Proxies.

Why do http and ftp requests to certain web sites sometimes fail?
Due to heavy demand at very popular web sites, a server may be overloaded and can turn away requests. If you run into this problem, try accessing the site again later.

Why are some menu entries in &browser.name; dimmed (and unusable)?
Dimmed menu items indicate that the menu item is not available because of the current state of the browser. For example, the Stop Loading menu item is not available when nothing is currently being loaded. Also, if your system is running very low on memory, some items may be disabled temporarily.

When I download a file of a certain type, &browser.name; displays a page that says "Unable to Launch Viewer." What can I do?
On network computers, such as the JavaStationTM platform, you may not have the capability to launch external applications.

On other platforms, such as the SolarisTM platform, a frequent cause of this problem is not setting the exec.path property in your personal properties file. The exec.path property is a list of full directory names on your machine where &browser.name; should look for executable external viewer applications.

See Setting the exec.path Property for information.

I'm viewing an HTML page that has very long lines that are cut off before the end of the line. What's happening?
The text of most HTML pages automatically reformats itself to fit the size of your &browser.name; window. However, HTML text that appears under the <PRE> tag (meaning "preformatted") is not reformatted to fit the width of the browser. You can almost always scroll horizontally to see an entire line of preformatted text if it extends off the page. However, if a line of preformatted text exceeds 1024 characters, the line is truncated. &browser.name; sets the maximum possible number of displayed characters at 1024 characters.

When I type a web site address (or URL) that starts with "c:" on a Windows platform, I get an error message. Why doesn't &browser.name; recognize this as drive C?
When a URL starts with a simple text string before a colon, the string is considered to be an Internet Transfer Protocol. This is the standard syntax for URLs.

To access a file on your C drive, start your URL with the string /c:/yourfile or file:/c:/yourfile. If you want to list the contents of the C drive, use the URL /c:/. or file:/c:/.. Starting a URL with "/" or "file:/" indicates that you want to use the file protocol to access your C drive.

Why does &browser.name; map the URL "file://filename" to an ftp protocol?
URL conventions specify that whatever follows two slashes (//) is an Internet host computer, or a Web server, that makes files available to the World Wide Web. The file protocol only understands local files, not remote servers, so browsers routinely map such a URL to an ftp protocol. Therefore, a URL of the form "file://filename" is interpreted as "ftp://filename/".

&browser.name; lets me use an IP address in a URL within my firewall, but not in a URL outside the firewall. Why?
This is a known problem with some proxies, not a bug in &browser.name;. Try using a different proxy server.

I'm looking at a page that tells me to use my browser's search function to enter search terms. What does this mean?
You'll see this message when the current HTML document is a searchable index (that is, when it includes the ISINDEX HTML tag in the document head). Below this message you should see a text field with a label telling you to enter your search keywords. This is what the page is referring to as "your browser's search function."

Use this text field to request a keyword search. Type the keyword you wish to search for, or a space-separated list of keywords, and press Return or Enter. &browser.name; then passes this search information to the document's server, which performs the search.

The difference between Edit->Find in Page searches and ISINDEX searches is that Find in Page signals &browser.name; to search the currently displayed page, while ISINDEX searches ask the current document's server to search a database that the server maintains. What is returned by an ISINDEX search depends on how the server displays the results.

Some of &browser.name;'s features quit working or were disabled. What happened?
If you're running &browser.name; on a system with low memory constraints, &browser.name; may be running out of memory.

When &browser.name; gets close to reaching its memory limit, it becomes aggressive in its attempts to free up memory. The actions that &browser.name; takes to free up memory in extreme conditions may include the following:

Note: The user-visible actions to clear memory are only likely to happen on systems with very low memory resources.


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