Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

pulltech.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 350 posts

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#261

Post by T-hawk »

Touche wrote: post #250
tootie wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Average consumers almost never touch ftp anymore. I'm a tech pro and even I haven't used ftp in years. Having ftp servers accessible from a browser is a fairly useless luxury at this point. Dedicated ftp clients are very easy to come by for anyone.

Do dedicated ftp clients include crawling and indexing?

Neither does the browser. The search engine does that. What should happen here is the search engine still crawls and indexes resources accessible by ftp, and the ftp:// url gets passed to the operating system to launch an appropriate native program. This happens for protocols like magnet:// and discord:// .

Whether Google's search engine will continue to do so for ftp:// resources once Google's web browser no longer handles them remains to be seen.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#262

Post by tim58 »

Karunamon wrote: post #213
PascLeRasc wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large number of academic labs share data by hosting it over FTP. You can harp on about better methods or whatever but these people do not care and don't have time/energy to start caring.

Can’t Chrome just hand the ftp:// link over to a dedicated client?

Sure Chrome can. However this reduces accessibility. What if someone has never heard of FTP? Learning about it and installing an FTP client is a large barrier compared to starting a download. Reducing accessibility is a breaking change IMO.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#263

Post by Kye »

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.

RSS is still alive and well. Podcasting depends on it.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#264

Post by syshum »

shscs911 wrote: post #254
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…

Its not just Chrome, Firefox is planning to deprecate it as well ( https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-and-fire... ). Relevant Bugzilla ticket ( http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85464 )

Not Surprising given Mozilla Stance to duplicate and support everything Google does in a effort to chase relevancy again

Mozilla has lost the ability to be an independent protector of the Open Web

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#265

Post by hedora »

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.

In ftp, the ftp server is designed to act as the load balancer. (Just have the firewall point each port to a different IP.)

Also, this enables linear scale out, since not all ftp data nodes (not sure what the correct term was) need to store all of the data that’s being served, and you can store multiple copies of each file.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure why HDFS exists, given that you can just use a ftp server cluster for the same effect.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#266

Post by tim58 »

notatoad wrote: post #74
tim58 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not fine with this. I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today. This is a breaking change on a critical piece of internet infrastructure. Google, by nature of operating the most popular web browser, has a moral obligation to the community to provide a stable environment. There are something like 10^9 webpages out there. How many of these will become less accessible because of this change?…

>I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today. Given that chrome didn't exist 20 years ago, this seems like a fairly absurd position to apply to this situation. No code from 20 years ago relies on chrome having ftp support.

Web browsers existed 20 years ago. We should be able to visit and use a website written in 1999 on any modern browser.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#267

Post by arvidkahl »

I always liked FTP support as a part of the browser platform. Of course, it would not have the capabilities of a standalone FTP client. And for those who needed those capabilities, lots of tools exist.

The web is not just HTTP. FTP has been the binary companion to the text-based HTTP protocol, and I think that for the sake of the browser being a platform and not just a viewing tool, it should stay.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#268

Post by syshum »

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 use RSS every day, I have 3 stops when I want to check on current events, my RSS Feeds, Reddit, and here...

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#269

Post by hedora »

a_t48 wrote: post #97
userbinator wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the article claims there are still bugs, because one would think (hope) that a protocol over 30 years old with an implementation over a decade old should've received its last bugfix long ago and become truly stable by now.

Can you give an example of a piece of software of reasonable complexity (network/file handling, etc) that has solidified like this?

Everything in the openbsd base image.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#270

Post by nyxxie »

OrgNet wrote: post #257
nyxxie wrote: post #252

A lot of Google hate in this thread. Normally I'm on board, but I think you guys are making a big deal out of nothing. When I click magnet:// links, my bittorrent client opens. When I click slack:// links, my slack client opens. With this change, when I click ftp:// my ftp client will open. Chrome has simply decided it only wants to spend resources focusing on http:// and make the unrelated protocols separate. I see…

Do they index magnet and slack links?

No, but they currently index ftp links.
Post reply on HN