If anyone remembers how jQuery forum JSON.parse "upheaval" started ( a month ago?). When we noticed that JSON.parse() allows illegal JSON string syntax ? And when strict conformance to JSON syntax was introduced.
Well I made a little fuss over there and I was notified today this is fixed , inside V8. Now it just has to surface in some near future CHROME update.
This news might ( just might!) allow jQuery ajax *not* to do "manual" checking of data , before passing it to JSON.parse(). But to do it only for browsers which still do not have native JSON.
I think it would be good to keep doing the manual check of the incoming JSON, regardless - at least that way we can provide a consistent error message to the user.