Netscape 7.1 is developed from the Mozilla Application Suite 1.4 and as such shares much of the same basic technology. In addition to the technologies that Netscape 7.1 shares with Mozilla 1.4, it includes additional features such as a number of installed plugins, support for Windows Media Player Active X control which are not available in Mozilla.
Since Netscape 7.1 is targeted at the general web population and not specifically to web developers, it is important for web developers to develop and test their content in Netscape 7.1 to ensure that differences between Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 do not cause problems for web site visitors.
To help web developers support Netscape 7.1, a new custom installation option is available which will install the "Web Developer Pack" which includes several of the tools previously available for Mozilla.
Venkman, the JavaScript Debugger for Mozilla and Netscape 7.
Learn more about Venkman in Venkman, the new JavaScript Debugger for Netscape 7.x and Using Breakpoints in Venkman.
DOM Inspector, a tool which allows inspection and modification of document without having to edit the document directly.
Read Ian Oeschger's Introduction to the DOM Inspector and grayrest's Guide to the DOM Inspector for more details on what the DOM Inspector can do for you.
Chatzilla, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Since Netscape 7.0, based upon Mozilla 1.0.1, was released, many thousands of bugs have been fixed, and numerous improvements made and features introduced. This is a small sample of some of the new features available in Netscape 7.1 and/or Mozilla 1.4.
Netscape 7.1 promises to be the fastest and most stable Netscape browser ever.
Typing about:config into Netscape 7.1's URL bar will
now display all preferences and allow existing preferences to be
modified or new ones added without having to exit the browser and
edit the preferences files manually.
Web developers can now click on an error message in the JavaScript console to view the exact line of the source code containing the error.
No longer do web developers have to search through a long source listing to identify the markup behind the visibile representation of a web page. Highlighting the text in a web page and clicking on "View Selection Source" in the context menu will automatically display the markup behind the highlighted text.
Netscape 7.1 will now display a "tree" based view of XML Documents which do not contain CSS or XSLT style instructions.
Netscape 7.1 now implements a version of Internet Explorer's designMode feature. Thus allowing web developers to turn HTML documents into rich-text editors. To learn more read Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla 1.3.
Web developers can now manipulate XML documents using XSLT through JavaScript. Read all about it in The XSLT/JavaScript Interface In Gecko.
Netscape 7.1 now includes support to Web Services via JavaScript APIs. Now web sites can deploy web applications that connect with remote web services using programmatic interfaces. This mechanism is possible because of the new SOAP and WSDL interfaces implemented in Netscape Gecko. For developer information about the Web Services support in Netscape Gecko please refer to the Mozilla Web Services Projects web page.
Web developers can now support Internet Explorer and Netscape 7.1 using the same media and controls. Learn how to use Windows Media Player Active X controls in Netscape 7.1 in Windows Media Player in Netscape 7.1.
Web developers can now link to sites using URLs containing non-ASCII characters. Learn more about this exciting development in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Support in Netscape 7.1/Mozilla 1.4.
Netscape 7.1's support for Web standards continues to improve with consistent cross-platform implementations for HTML 4.0, Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), XML 1.0, XHTML 1.0, XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, partial XML Base, simple Xlinks, XPointer, FIXptr, Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1), the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2). partial support for Document Object Model level 3 (DOM3), Simple Object Access Protocol 1.1 (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Netscape 7.1 features a solid foundation of support for data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG and PNG) and the latest version of the world's most popular scripting language, JavaScript 1.5.
Many changes have been introduced into Mozilla since Netscape 7.0 was first released in August 2002. Mozilla has progressed from version 1.0 to version 1.4, with many new features and bug fixes. The Mozilla release-notes are excellent sources of information about changes in each release of Mozilla.