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Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#171

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #121
nashashmi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm 30 years old and using FTP daily.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#172

Post by jedberg »

antisol wrote: post #166
jedberg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but FTP is still a widely used protocol. I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I landed on a page with FTP or had to use FTP in any way. Even lists of file downloads are http pages where I just click on the file.

So your argument is that because you haven't used it lately, nobody does? Seems legit.

Yeah actually it is. I’m a pretty technical user and use the web and the internet a lot.

I can’t think of a scenario where I would need FTP in 2021. Can you point me at one?

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#173

Post by floatboth »

kragen wrote: post #129
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…

I have seen FTP links for big downloads in the past. Never, not once have I seen HTML files served over FTP. Who in the hell ever did that?! WHY??

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#174

Post by mattl »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #154
lallysingh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, literally not. It's an internet service, sure, but not the web.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://example.com/ ), which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet.

The web is HTML and HTTP. URLs to HTTP resources are links to things on the web, URLs to non-web resources are links to things on the Internet, maybe... maybe not, maybe links to other computers in your home, or files on disk.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#175

Post by rasz »

Nicksil wrote: post #2

>If you are a Firefox user, you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this security advancement. The epitome of corporate speak: "we're taking away a feature of this software. You're welcome." I expect that kind of talk from Google; hearing it from Mozilla makes me a little sad.

At this point Google is the sole source of Mozilla income, how do you know this line didnt come directly from them?

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#176

Post by floatboth »

desktopninja wrote: post #114
handrous wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ftps exists. The solution to http wasn't getting rid of it, it was pushing for more https. I'm not saying there weren't good reasons to get rid of ftp support, but that doesn't seem like one.

Surprising how many people don't know about ftps. FTP with SSL.

It's very obscure. Most things (mostly shared hosting lol) went straight to SSH's SFTP instead.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#177

Post by thrower123 »

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…

What exactly about FTP has changed that invalidates the FTP browser code that's been in Firefox for 20+ years?

People bitched when Firefox added a stupid non-standard thing, yes. Now, the few who still use Firefox, will bitch because they have arbitrarily removed a standard thing.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#178

Post by antisol »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #117
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.

No, they're breaking with accessing a part of the internet that web browsers used to support, an no one does anymore. They are most certainly not break the web itself. These are different things: if you need FTP (and let's be real: you don't), then as a user you still have TONS of options available to you, and as a host even legacy systems using ancient versions of Apache can already serve file listings as standard w…

> (and let's be real: you don't)

OMG! Look, everyone: a telepath! ESP IS REAL!

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#179

Post by mattl »

sschueller wrote: post #32
MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote: post #7

I expect this to have very little impact on anything.

Well I'm going to move all my documents and files that are available for download to a public ftp. If you use Firefox you won't have access, sorry.

Firefox will just prompt you for an application to use for `ftp` URLs.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#180

Post by floatboth »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #49

Let's look at this from the other end of the horse. FTP is a horrible kludge that needs to be depreciated. SFTP is better. The number of ports needed, holes punched in firewalls, everything sent in plain-text, inability to traverse NAT without more kludge and hacky work-arounds. We only tolerate it because it was the only thing that worked. There are better/newer methods that should be embraced. We don't bemoan the d…

There's definitely a group of people that bemoans the death of Gopher: they've tried to resurrect it and even are reinventing it as Gemini. They do use TLS in there at least :)
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