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Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

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Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#231

Post by ajnin »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #178
TeMPOraL wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is optimizing its browser for the majority, chrome is not a power-user browser. That is a problem. We have browser engine duopoly, and really everyone is doing whatever Google wants anyway. So as they're optimizing against power users, they're making the whole web much worse.

Can you please explain to me why you believe optimising against power users is making the internet worse. I tend to agree with you, but would you mind fleshing this out a bit. Or, if you've written this before please point to it.

I think the term "power users" is not appropriate. I believe we're encountering some kind of "curse of multidimensionality" problem here: every time Google adds a feature, they add one dimension to the space of utility of their product. And every time they remove a feature, they reduce the relative volume of people who still find the product useful. So it's not "power users" in general, but "power users of feature X". There are not the power users who use all the advanced features on one side, and the regular users who use none on the other. The more features you add or cut, the more each of those categories tend to zero. Actual users are somewhere in between, and if you optimize against "power users" you in fact optimize against your users in general.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#232

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

duskwuff wrote: post #119
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What big attack surface? The client? FTP is an ugly/stupid protocol, but it's not really complex (I suspect it's far simpler than HTTP).

FTP has some pretty serious quirks. Active-mode FTP is probably the craziest one by modern standards -- the client opens a port and asks the server to connect to it to send a file. Needless to say, this is effectively unusable on the modern Internet. Its replacement, passive-mode FTP, has the server open a port instead; this configuration is merely incompatible with most load balancers.

Oh, absolutely! I said it was ugly/stupid from personal experience:) But it's a form of stupid that can be condensed into a single state diagram that would fit on half a sheet of paper, so I'm not super concerned about it.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#234

Post by mhb »

scrollaway wrote: post #203
jotm wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible how that happened. I used Google Reader a lot, adding any interesting blogs I would find. Now I can't find any of them again :/ I think I've got a list saved somewhere, but it was just so easy to go through Reader.

I recommend https://bazqux.com/ -- The death of Reader sprung the life of many pre-existing RSS reader replacements.

Looks good, but having to sign in with a third party - yuk.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#235

Post by rsync »

Someone1234 wrote: post #31
m463 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not a great protocol.

It is definitely a product of its time. Even FTPS isn't very good. SFTP is though (poorly named, it is based on SSH rather than the FTP protocol), but no web browser that I know of supports SFTP.

"SFTP is though (poorly named, it is based on SSH rather than the FTP protocol), but no web browser that I know of supports SFTP."

For a time I was using Konqueror with fish:// URLs as a SFTP browser and it worked very well and made me happy ...

I am not sure if that workflow still works but most rsync.net customers that I interact with are using sshfs on top of FUSE and mounting ssh resources as a local filesystem - so no browser involved.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#236

Post by ksec »

dmix wrote: post #168
weinzierl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when www was just a part of the Internet and we had www search and ftp search engines. The one I used to use was called "ftpsearch" and the only thing (besides the name) I remember is that it used to say "This server is located in Trondheim" on the front page. A quick web search turns out that it still seems to exist in some form [1]. Unfortunately it apparently doesn't really work anymore. Maybe it'…

I just hope this isn't like how Google basically killed off RSS when they killed off the best client that everyone was using (which I've still never heard a good reason why) which I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog. And yes I know there's some niche support still, just as FTP will live on.

>I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog.

Is that really the case though? Wordpress ( Love it or Hate it ), both .com and self hosted is still thriving.

And if people are writing less blog, I think it has more to do with Social Media ( Facebook ) than RSS or Google Search / Reader.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#238

Post by tln »

Jaruzel wrote: post #221

There are 100,000s of resources on publicly accessible FTP servers and the removal of direct access to these files via one of the worlds most used browsers is major blow for information storage and retrieval on the internet. It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if…

> There are 100,000s of resources [...] major blow for information storage

Thats a very small fraction of all the resources.

> It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if their own browser can't connect to them.

This is a worthy concern, for sure. Although how do you know they haven't already done this? Do you have a search that shows ftp: urls?

> The internet started off as a wonderful limitless information sharing platform, now it's just a shopping mall controlled by corporates.

I'm trying to think of the period when the internet wasn't driven by corporate interests. Before the dot com boom, I suppose? When newsgroups thrived, and email servers roamed free without spam? That was fun but theres a fuckton more information on the internet now.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#239

Post by kbrosnan »

The_rationalist wrote: post #175
Endy wrote: post #62

Second best reason to move away from Chrome.

Ridiculous, Firefox removed support for FTP far before chrome.

Firefox has not removed support for ftp. I just browsed to ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/ in Firefox 68 just before submitting this comment.

Mozilla stopped running ftp://ftp.mozilla.org quite a while ago. Maybe that is what you were remembering?

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#240

Post by jsnell »

tln wrote: post #238
Jaruzel wrote: post #221

There are 100,000s of resources on publicly accessible FTP servers and the removal of direct access to these files via one of the worlds most used browsers is major blow for information storage and retrieval on the internet. It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if…

> There are 100,000s of resources [...] major blow for information storage Thats a very small fraction of all the resources. > It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if their own browser can't connect to them. This is a worthy concern, for sure. Although how do you k…

> Do you have a search that shows ftp: urls?

Sure, searching for "rfc 1337 inurl:ftp" returns FTP urls for the top four results for me.

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