LiveWire's behavior involves some fairly heavy processing for its color and animation effects, compared with other Cool Focus applets, and these requirements are too much for JVM 1.1.5 to handle. As a result, Netscape versions that shipped with that JVM run LiveWire very poorly indeed, to the extent that we regard the applet as unusable in the later v4 browsers.

LiveWire does run in Netscape 6, whose Java support is provided by a Sun plugin, along with Opera 4+, Internet Explorer 4+, and earlier Netscape 4x versions. (As an indication of just how badly Netscape lost the plot, even Netscape 3.02 runs LiveWire pretty smoothly!)

Of course, we'd like LiveWire to support those later Netscape 4s, but we can only do that by removing pieces of LiveWire's personality until it's simple enough for JVM 1.1.5 to handle. We don't believe that we, or anyone else, should be forced to lower their standards just because Netscape lowered theirs, so we're leaving LiveWire as it is.

The result is that a workaround is needed, and we can suggest three options:

1. The first, of course, is to use a different menu applet. We hope you won't, but we're honor-bound to point that out as Option #1!

2. Use the Flash Edition of LiveWire instead.

3. LiveWire includes a built-in 'JVM 1.1.5 spotter' and two parameters: 'NetscapeRedirectURL' and 'NetscapeRedirectTarget'. Create a separate HTML page containing alternative navigation and enter its URL in the first of those parameters. If a user visits with a JVM 1.1.5 browser, the applet will automatically redirect to this page. (The second parameter defaults to '_self' for the target frame and should rarely need to be included.)