Removal of MNG/JNG support and builds

[shadytrees]

Anybody wish to explain what QT is and what happened? (I'm curious).

[willll]

Anybody wish to explain what QT is and what happened? (I'm curious).

<a href="http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/index.html">Qt</a> is a multiplatform GUI toolkit, that was supported in Mozilla, but apparently it started to really suck because no one was making new code for it. So earlier this year all the Qt code was totally dropped from the trunk.

[davebug]

As was somewhat said earlier, I believe the standard is, and should continue to be whether it's recommended by the W3C. I'd rather Mozilla continue to add, improve and develop using those recommendations as guidelines than spend time and filesize implementing solutions that aren't yet recommended.

If you really miss it and want it in, write the W3C and request that it get added to their list of recommended technologies. That, presumably, would raise its probability of being included standard with any Mozilla product.

[willll]

As was somewhat said earlier, I believe the standard is, and should continue to be whether it's recommended by the W3C. I'd rather Mozilla continue to add, improve and develop using those recommendations as guidelines than spend time and filesize implementing solutions that aren't yet recommended.

If you really miss it and want it in, write the W3C and request that it get added to their list of recommended technologies. That, presumably, would raise its probability of being included standard with any Mozilla product.

So why are we using JPEG? What about GIF? BMP? ICO? And btw, mozilla developers are not spending any time developing it as linmng is developed independently. Also we are breaking this, when have had support for it before NS 6.

[asa]

So why are we using JPEG? What about GIF? BMP? ICO?

Some numbers that I get from a hotbot/inktomi query on various extension types used in real live webpages.

bmp: 1,161,483
png: 7,795,352
jpg/jpeg: 291,483,405
gif: 317,886,074

jng: 10
mng: 291

Both of those numbers (mng/jng) have dropped since I last ran the query 3 months ago while the others have grown.

--Asa

[pavlov]

QT, now MNG. I wonder what is next...?

There was actually a very valid reason for removing qt: no one was willing to maintain it. This MNG situation is VERY different.

Since you know so much about it, please explain to me how it was very different. There was 1 person who said he might be able to help reduce the footprint if he had time. That doesn't sound "VERY different" to me. I suggest fully understanding the issue before making comments on things.

[Hooded One]

There was 1 person who said he might be able to help reduce the footprint if he had time. That doesn't sound "VERY different" to me.

One person expressing that he tentatively might be able to work on something is significantly different from somebody who knows the format intimately actively working on it.

I think another major reason that there are so few MNGs out there is that nobody knows about them. I sure didn't know about them until I started poking around the forums here a bit.

[ann-dee-roo]

Hey, as long as it's available as an extension I'm happy. I mean, that's the whole point of extensions isn't it? To give support for certain doohickies that some people might not want.

Maybe someone should make a post about this on the MozillaZine homepage and we'll see how many people download the extension.

[Disreali]

Hey, as long as it's available as an extension I'm happy. I mean, that's the whole point of extensions isn't it? To give support for certain doohickies that some people might not want.

Maybe someone should make a post about this on the MozillaZine homepage and we'll see how many people download the extension.

Extentions are good, but sometime don't work with all the platforms on which MozillaFB is avaliable. And what about the MozAppSuite? I would rather have the decoder included in the trunk and allow for a compile-time enable/disable option.

[Gyges]

I don't want to sound like I'm raising a fuss, but the reasons for removing MNG support are a bit on the ridiculous. The reduction of code size is minor and the non-support by the W3C may be "good reasons," but I went to the W3C site this morning and found a few references to MNGs. None were saying that it would be added to the W3C specifications nor that it never would be.

On a related note, the W3C seems very supportive of the SVG standard of theirs, and yet when I tried to view the examples in Mozilla Firebird... guess what? It asked me to download and install the Adobe SVG viewer. No native support of SVG. I checked the mozillazine archives and there was a move to add it back in 1999, but nothing more recent.

So why remove MNG for not being a W3C standard, but no native support for the W3C's graphic format?

[goodben]

If I remember rightly, there's a compile option for SVG that's turned off by default. If you look around in the AppSuite builds, I think you can find one with it enabled. I'm not sure what the performance of Mozilla's built in support vs. the Adobe plugin is.

[alanjstr]

I believe they are working on SVG, but so far it's buggy.

[dunda]

According to the linked xpi page the windows decoder is only 92k.

Even at 56k modem speeds thats seconds isnt it.

So... they split mozilla into mail and browser - the sum of which is larger than mozilla was... yet we can't spare 92k.

I find the apparent future path of this mozillaphoenixbirdwhatever project very odd at times.

[old jasonb]

So... they split mozilla into mail and browser - the sum of which is larger than mozilla was...

This is only temporary due to the fact that GRE isn't yet implemented properly and both Firebird and Thunderbird contain their own copies (so you're effectively downloading and installing it twice). Once GRE is handled correctly, you can cut the combined size of both by the size of the GRE itself. (At least, that's my understanding.)

[dunda]

I see, thanks for clarifying I appreciate it.