Preferences are used to make HotJava work in your environment and to customize certain user interface aspects of HotJava.

Choose Preferences from the Edit menu, then one of the following from the submenu:

To Set Display Preferences

Display preferences affect the default home page, the position of the navigation buttons, link style, and font.

Setting the First Page Displayed

Modifying Display Parameters

To Set Proxies

If you're running HotJava in a networked environment, and you're having trouble accessing Web pages, you might need to set Proxy servers to enable access outside of your company network. Proxies are the servers or gateways for Internet access through your network firewall. To specify proxy servers:

Ask your system administrator for the proxy information specific to your site. See the HotJava User's Guide for more information on proxies.

HotJava supports the following protocols for which you may need to set proxies and ports.

Your system administrator should tell you what you need.

The following two settings are also on the Proxies page.

A Caching proxy may improve performance and reduce network traffic. Caching Web pages means temporarily storing them to disk so they don't have to be downloaded across the network each time they are accessed.

Note: When the Caching Proxy is set, ALL requests are attempted through the caching server only.

SOCKS is another kind of server that allows access across the network firewall. Ask your system administrator if you should be using SOCKS or the proxy servers and the name and port of the appropriate server(s).

To Send Mail

You can use HotJava to send email. To set up your return email address in advance, choose Mail from the Preferences submenu of the Edit menu.

Setting Your Email Return Address

Check that your email address is correct or click in the Email Address field to change it.

Setting Your Mail (SMTP) Server

If the system you're running HotJava on is the same as your mail server, you may not need to enter anything in this field. See The HotJava User's Guide for more information.

To Control Applet Security

In general, applets loaded over the net are prevented from reading and writing files on the client file system, and from making network connections except to the originating host. HotJava provides two settings you can use to loosen the restrictions a little. For more information, see the Applet Security FAQ.

Choose Applet Security from the Preferences submenu of the Edit menu.

To Set Applet Access to the Network

Choose from None, Applet Host (the default), or Unrestricted to specify whether Applets can open network connections.

To Set Applet Access to Classes

Choose from Restricted (the default) or Unrestricted to specify whether applets can access Sun classes (internal Java code).
Other Getting Started topics: