Comments were removed for several reasons; one being that it adds the ability to add non-JSON data to the stream. In order to keep the spec simple and more interoperable, comments are gone. Don't expect them to return.

I, too, would love to see comments officially supported in the next iteration of the JSON standard...IIRC, Crockford removed them to make JSON a valid YAML subset.

For what it's worth, I've created a fork of Kyle Simpson's `JSON.minify` project that uses a variation of the character-based parsing process in JSON 3: https://github.com/kitcambridge/JSON.minify/blob/master/mini... It's somewhat cumbersome to use, though, as it needs to be called on a string before feeding it to `parse` (e.g., `JSON.parse(JSON.minify("/* Hello */ 123"))`).

Please, yes. Two use cases where I constantly bemoan the lack of comment support in JSON are configuration files and test fixtures.

Optional quotes and optional EOL commas would be nice too