MNG support removed from Mozilla

Let me get this straight—Mozilla added support for the usability decreasing Marquee tag because a few sites in China used it, but removes support for MNG, the only animated image format that supports alpha transparency and is currently used by Mozilla themes? Yeah, that makes sense. Reading comments in bug 195280 it appears that the current module owner wants to call it quits. No big deal—someone else has offered to take over. There’s also a complaint that at 166K, MNG support is too big, but that seems grounds for improving it, not removing it. Finally, some said that it wasn’t a W3C standard, so it should be gone. Standard or not, it’s being used and supported by a number of apps. The discussion in the bug got pretty heated. As near as I can determine, the only reason it’s being removed is because they said they were going to and had a patch. I’m just cynical enough to believe that this means the next version of Netscape (based on 1.4) won’t have MNG/JNG support, although currently the removal only applies to the trunk. (Netscape 6 and 7 did.) If you disagree with this removal, go vote for bug 18574, now one of the top 20 most voted for bugs in Mozilla.