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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?
ftp://apple.asimov.net Archive of apple 2 software and documentation. I use it a lot.
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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 situatio…
Absolutely not the same situation. There are numerous mentions in this very thread about industries / sectors that still heavily rely on FTP. There's hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts that rely on data being transferred using that protocol. This isn't people enjoying retro computing. This is day-to-day operations.
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You're saying it was normal (and is even today) to show HTML files over ftp links? I've never seen a browser do HTML over ftp, and while I am a youngster compared to HTTP (I stared to do web stuff in the early 2000's) the sites where I've seen that had both HTTP and FTP modes the ftp mode only downloaded the file, it did not show it. > More broadly, this is a tradeoff between the traditional vision of the WWW as a va…
> I get the "strip-mall vision of the WWW as a means to sell people things they don't need" complaint, but that does not seem related to the protocol discussion of HTTP and FTP at all. Web pages that are profit-making ventures, with employees dedicated to working around the latest browser featurectomies, will have no trouble with this sort of constant change. Web pages that are just HTML files that someone uploaded t…
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http://web.mit.edu/~linux/redhat/docs/MIRRORS.html
Sure, but what is the use case of browsing that with a web browser? Both Finder and Explorer can natively support ftp, and there are plenty of other clients.
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Is running a webserver different from running a ftp server? I've run both and never noticed much of a difference.
Well, I'm not saying running ftp to serve html is better. All I'm saying is that it can sometimes be the only supported option, or viable option. And there are major differences. Webserver access permissions vs. ftp server permissions for example?
What I'm saying is: is there a meaningful difference? Both need to bind to a port that is privileged and read files from the served directory. There is no difference between a ftpserver and a webserver from a permissions/privilege perspective.
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Here is a real world example: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/08/chrome-murders-ftp-li...
A "real world example" involving a single HTML file (not even a web site, just a bare file!) from 1997 is pretty weak.
If you want to know what 02017 was like, you can ask pretty much anybody; most of them will remember pretty well. You may remember yourself. But if you want to know what 01997 was like, well, most people have pretty much forgotten. Did you know they didn't check your ID at the airport in 01997? People would resell non-refundable airline tickets in newspaper classified ads. Airlines wanted to stop this practice, but competition prevented them from instituting mandatory ID checks. Until 02001, when the US entered a permanent state of war on abstract concepts.
It's true that there are a lot of things that are true today that weren't true in 01997. But most of those things are not worth knowing, because they won't be true in 02045 either. In fact, a lot of them won't be true in 02022.
So, losing access to a web page from 02020 is bad, but losing access to one of the few remaining web pages from 01997 is much worse.
Why are there people who think otherwise? Because they never learned to think of the World Wide Web as the greatest library in human history, probably because they don't value libraries or learning; instead they think of it as a way to dunk on their political opponents and consume up-to-date memes from Instagram or Netflix.
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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…
> 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.
I had to use it this past weekend to get some firmware from the vendor for a network switch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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…
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Sure, but what is the use case of browsing that with a web browser? Both Finder and Explorer can natively support ftp, and there are plenty of other clients.
You asked for a scenario in which you need ftp in 2021. You handled my example by switching to another program, such as finder or explorer. That's fine. Do you agree that your user experience decreased by having to switch programs?
No, because it opened automatically and was nearly seamless. I didn't even notice that I'd been moved to Finder at first.
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I'd just like to add to this that ftp is a relatively simple protocol, not particularly complicated to implement. It's not a constantly fluctuating standard that requires a team of 50 developers to keep pace with. Supporting FTP isn't some big technical challenge. The code has been there in the firefox codebase for nearly 20 years now, running just fine. All you need to do to continue to support ftp is nothing at all…
> ftp is a relatively simple protocol, not particularly complicated to implement Parts of it are, sure, but parts of it are an absolutely horror show (The client opens a port, and then the server connects back to it!?), text conversion and binary modes that's based on ASCII, different list formats, etc. It's not great. Worse, it doesn't support the good stuff like implicit TLS extensions > Supporting FTP isn't some b…
It's simpler than a pdf viewer.
>It's a cost-benefit analysis
If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone already had one. Near-zero benefit, huge cost.
>I want Mozilla to do more.
At this point I'm afraid we're just going to have to agree to disagree. For the last 5+ years, Every time Mozilla "do more", I throw up in my mouth a little.