Removal of MNG/JNG support and builds

[nilson]

So when will this take effect? Will it be seen with the June 4th build? Looks like I'm gonna be with the build from the 3rd for a long time... at least till this gets checked back in...

[pavlov]

That is correct. It will be gone in tomorrow's build.

[nilson]

OK, thanks.

[ann-dee-roo]

Why is it they're removing MNG/JNG support? Is it buggy, or is it for the extra 300k like Thunderbird?

[neilj]

I think its because no one uses it, but I'm not sure.

[Sipaq]

Why is it they're removing MNG/JNG support? Is it buggy, or is it for the extra 300k like Thunderbird?

<ol>
<li>It's quite big, bigger than all the other image decoders combined</li>
<li>The current maintainer didn't want to maintain it any longer</li>
<li>It's not widely used on the web at the moment</li>
</ol>Ad 1:
Efforts to leverage this have been underway. (see my recent blog entry for links)

Ad 2:
A new maintainer (the creator of this image format) wanted to step up (see my blog for links)

Ad 3:
Other web technologies like CSS or PNG also weren't widely supported, when thei support started in Mozilla. It's a hen-eg-kind of thing. Nobody will use unless at least some browsers support it. But browser developers won't support it unless someone is actually using this stuff.

[SushiFugu]

Personally I think supporting new, up-and-coming technologies and standards is an important thing. I wish it would stay, even if it is underused at the moment :\

[Colin Ramsay]

At 300k I'm glad it's being dropped for the moment.

[kilolima]

geez, we finally get a decent technology and ppl want to drop it becuase it's too big...

HELLO Phoenix DEVLOPERS, HELLO!! Have you ever compared a frames-equivalent MNG and an animated GIF filesize? The GIF is about 10 TIMES BIGGER. So great, now we're going to have to use crappy GIF's and this will make using them for anything but annoying banner adds pointless.

Personally, I don't think a browser should sacrifice standards to skimp on filesize.

Of course, I don't think I'll ever go past the .5 phoenix build, anyway. So who cares.

[alanjstr]

One of the big problems for MNG is that it's not a W3C recommendation. Web developers are unlikely to use it and that pretty much leaves the throbber in the browser as the most common use. Not a lot of point in keeping 300 KB around just for that.

I fully support the intention of MNG, but I don't think that the time is right for it to be included by default. Perhaps someone can turn it into an extension instead. Or maybe they can consolidate lots of the image handling code so that MNG isn't a standalone behemoth.

[RIV@NVX]

Wasn't MNG used for Qute throbber?

[alanjstr]

According to Simon's blog they changed the official throbber (though I didn't notice the cvs checkin offhand).

Pinball is still looking for someone to create a nice throbber for us.

[Simplex]

You guys should really check out the bug (<a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280">bug 12633</a>). Almost all your questions are answered there:

<a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280#c74">comment 74</a>
"Just fyi, New throbbers were provided to the firebird/thunderbird teams and
should be getting checked in soon."

Also, there is another bug to help lower the footprint of MNG support so it will be added back in (<a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204520">bug 204520</a>).

[Aqua.]

My $0.02

There's the chicken and egg issue, but it has to be supported by browsers before people use it. What's 300kb in a world of broadband... a few seconds?

I'm personally on a dial-up and I think it's worth a couple extra minutes to get .MNG support.

BTW, what's JNG? I know about PNG (I use it on most of my sites) and MNG, but I've never heard of JNG.

[Colin Ramsay]

geez, we finally get a decent technology and ppl want to drop it becuase it's too big...

HELLO Phoenix DEVLOPERS, HELLO!! Have you ever compared a frames-equivalent MNG and an animated GIF filesize? The GIF is about 10 TIMES BIGGER. So great, now we're going to have to use crappy GIF's and this will make using them for anything but annoying banner adds pointless.

Personally, I don't think a browser should sacrifice standards to skimp on filesize.

Of course, I don't think I'll ever go past the .5 phoenix build, anyway. So who cares.

Aside from the trollish nature of this post... by implementing a non-standard format such as this, Firebird will be just as bad as IE. Sites designed for FB will not work in IE, not because IE is broken in this case, but because FB has mistakenly not worked to a standard.