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Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#121

Post by TheRealPomax »

nashashmi wrote: post #87
acabal wrote: post #36

I don't understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they're taking an old feature that's definitely not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining? Firefox can't be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not…

Understand this: ftp has been with the browser for 25 years. Ftp has been with the web. Ftp is part of the web. No one cares that ftp is not really what browsers are made for. Browsers is how people access ftp. That’s it. And they have been used in of web pages too.

Yeah, really gonna need some numbers here, though, because literally no one I know younger than 40 even knows what FTP is, let alone having used it.

Even Apache 1 can expose dirs over http instead of ftp, there is literally no reason for FTP unless you want uploads. In which case: no you don't, you want sftp at the very least, because you care about the fact that you want data that gets uploaded to be your data, not the data that a MITM trivially changed it to. Which FTP fully allows.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#122

Post by genewitch »

RadioactiveMan wrote: post #67
acabal wrote: post #36

I don't understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they're taking an old feature that's definitely not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining? Firefox can't be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not…

> People complained when Firefox added [...] > Now they're [...] removing [...], and people are still complaining? It's different people.

This right here is something I want to say every time the "people said x, now people say y" paradigm appears. The word "people" in both cases are not the same persons.

It is a shorthand but it always seems like it's designed as a "gotcha". I haven't thought enough about it to figure out what fallacy it entails, just enough to ignore it anytime I see an argument that uses it.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#123

Post by tyingq »

tkzed49 wrote: post #104
tyingq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's old, but "ftp://" is a valid uri scheme that has established use, and lots of valid links on existing, live web pages. Browsers removing support are breaking part of the web that was working fine.

There are lots of URI schemes in use. Firefox removing support for FTP doesn't mean that you can no longer open FTP links from Firefox, it just means that they'll need to open in another client. I don't see how this breaks the web.

I think it effectively means that for many. Unless there's a really easy-to-follow error page.

I tried chrome on an ftp:// uri, and it just does nothing. I suspect because it was the Windows default app for ftp uri's, then they dropped support, but that didn't change the mapping in Windows.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#124

Post by qubidt »

duskwuff wrote: post #56
prepend wrote: post #12

This is frustrating. FTP is really handy for distributing some files and there are lots of servers in place that now Firefox users can’t access. One can argue that servers should upgrade, and that’s valid. But they don’t and they likely won’t do this just harms Firefox’s user base and is one more reason I no longer recommend Firefox. They just don’t seem user friendly as they once were. I would expect Mozilla to advo…

> there are lots of [FTP] servers in place... Define "lots". Chrome dropped FTP support in late 2020 and basically nobody noticed. The vast majority of the remaining public FTP servers are also accessible over HTTP. > I would expect Mozilla to advocate for more FTP as a cheap way of distributing files. In what sense is FTP "cheap"? What makes it any different from HTTP in that regard?

> Define "lots"

a ton of government and scientific datasets are provided over FTP

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#125

Post by jeppesen-io »

acabal wrote: post #36

I don't understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they're taking an old feature that's definitely not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining? Firefox can't be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not…

I agree. Creating some friction to encourage the move away from FTP is the right thing to do, for a variety of technical reasons

There are times when HN seems to become very negative to a particular topic. In the past I’ve seen it with Kubernetes, systemd or GCP/AWS. I feel it’s that way with Mozilla/Firefox. More often than not, comments on Mozilla/Firefox are very negative then create a feedback loop of negativity. Obviously subjective, but just what I see

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#126

Post by handrous »

gruez wrote: post #54
prepend wrote: post #12

This is frustrating. FTP is really handy for distributing some files and there are lots of servers in place that now Firefox users can’t access. One can argue that servers should upgrade, and that’s valid. But they don’t and they likely won’t do this just harms Firefox’s user base and is one more reason I no longer recommend Firefox. They just don’t seem user friendly as they once were. I would expect Mozilla to advo…

> This is frustrating. FTP is really handy for distributing some files and there are lots of servers in place that now Firefox users can’t access. Why are people still using ftp rather than http?

For one thing, you can't manage files over the same protocol you use to serve them, with HTTP, without extra application-layer add-ons (WebDAV or custom web file management junk) FTP can both serve and manage, all over one protocol.

"But why wouldn't you use some other method to manage your files? Why combine the two?" I dunno, but WordPress is basically that (managing your blog's/site's appearance, content, and server-side plugins, over the same interface/protocol that serves the blog/site) but for blogs & websites, and it's damn near the most successful Web project ever, so there must be something to it unless that's not a big reason for its success (and I'm pretty sure it is).

I can certainly see the appeal if your main focus is serving files, or providing file-serving hosting to others (say, other departments, or to paying clients, or whatever). One daemon to configure for the whole task.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#127

Post by tptacek »

dmux wrote: post #107
tptacek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People made exactly the same arguments, almost to the letter, about universalizing TLS. The arguments were made in good faith, often by very clueful people, but it's hard to dispute the positive results of the change. FTP needs to go.

And it completely cut off older devices from being able to access content that often didn't need to be transferred over TLS.

Shrug!

It's commercial infrastructure, not a fetish.

You saw the same arguments when the Python Cryptography library started adopting Rust to replace memory-unsafe C code in their C library. People running, like, DEC Alphas in their basements for sport were furious. It was on the front page of HN for several days. It blew over, because nobody really cares about those people in a durable, meaningful way.

Same situation with FTP. It's dead. Stick a fork in it.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#128

Post by handrous »

mmastrac wrote: post #60
daxuak wrote: post #51

FTP might be dying in other sectors, but at least in biomed research, I would use FTP anyday when the alternative protocol needs a client app and a bunch of configurations. It's also handy when sharing data. Browser support is important here because those files are often not explored from command line etc, but rather the FTP links are placed on individual pages as a quick download. At least for me, it's much more con…

Why not rsync, scp, https, or any other plethora of much better alternatives?

The former two (rsync, scp) are a lot more complex than ftp(s), since they both rely on at least some subset of ssh, plus some other stuff. They're not really suited for safely linking to unauthenticated downloads, either.

https doesn't let you also manage your files with the same protocol/daemon without other stuff on top of, or alongside, it.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#129

Post by kragen »

acabal wrote: post #36

I don't understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they're taking an old feature that's definitely not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining? Firefox can't be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not…

FTP has been related to web browsing since the beginning of the web 31 years ago. For maybe a decade (the first third of the web so far), most of the WWW was on FTP servers—not just most software downloads, but also most HTML pages. Web browsers are a much better interface to FTP servers than dedicated FTP clients, because you can click a link on an HTML page (either a statically generated directory, possibly on the FTP server itself, or a dynamically generated search result page) and get the file from the FTP server.

There are a few people commenting with nonsense like this:

> You can configure Firefox to open "ftp://" links with the client of your choice. This is a non-issue.

That's absolutely useless if the client of your choice can't render HTML and the ftp:// link is to an HTML file.

The fundamental idea of the WWW project was that it provided a universal, uniform interface to all the information on the internet, regardless of protocol. This move amounts to Firefox abandoning that vision. Abandoning Gopher was maybe reasonable—there just aren't that many Gopher servers out there—but FTP is still a widely used protocol.

More broadly, this is a tradeoff between the traditional vision of the WWW as a vast library, in which human knowledge accumulates over time and becomes accessible to all, and the strip-mall vision of the WWW as a means to sell people things they don't need. This move amounts to burning down a wing of the library (or, at least, its card catalog) because it wasn't profitable enough. Or because people keep getting mugged there, I guess.

This kind of intentional functionality regression is precisely the kind of thing I use free software to avoid.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#130

Post by rhacker »

I remember way back in the day with ftp.cdrom.com [1] this was an important browser feature. Nowadays this is totally pointless and mind-boggling that anyone still uses FTP at all (SFTP should be used now). And more-so http is resilient for resumable file downloads with range header requests. Also people can develop an extension.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM

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