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Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

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Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#321

Post by oblio »

antisol wrote: post #320
oblio wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone already had one. Near-zero benefit, huge cost. Every time I clicked a PDF online, I dreaded the external viewer opening (especially Adobe Reader). I very much liked when they integrated a PDF viewer. Chrome also has one. I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the users the FTP client had.

Sounds like you had a shitty pdf viewer installed. Which is not my problem. Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? >I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the us…

Vent, rant, get it out of your system :-)

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#322

Post by antisol »

oblio wrote: post #321
antisol wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you had a shitty pdf viewer installed. Which is not my problem. Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? >I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the us…

Vent, rant, get it out of your system :-)

Way ahead of ya ;)

but you didn't address my question

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#323

Post by [deleted] »

antisol wrote: post #318
fomine3 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla did great decision for security: develop PDF viewer as pdf.js. It works same as other webapps so no longer considered to attack surface, not like integrated PDF viewer, IIUC.

Oh cool! I didn't realise that their entire JS engine was formally verified!

[deleted]

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#324

Post by oblio »

antisol wrote: post #322
oblio wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vent, rant, get it out of your system :-)

Way ahead of ya ;) but you didn't address my question

All PDF viewers are crap in my experience. If you don't agree, you haven't used PDF enough. PDF has Javascript as a programming language, it has extensions for 3D models and a ton of other stuff (I think even sound). As a format it's almost as complex as the entire web stack.

Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much. That's not a product decision taken lightly.

Your personal experience does not reflect that of many other browser users, it seems. Even on mobile I dread clicking a PDF link.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#325

Post by jrochkind1 »

krylon wrote: post #145
jrochkind1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially because "The FTP protocol itself has been disabled by default since version 88", so any user that hadn't opted in to FTP protocol already had the "benefit" of the "security enhancement", no? But, hey, if you are not yet a FF user, here's where you can download it, in case you're looking for a browser that... lacks FTP support. Something many users are likely to be seeking out.

To be fair, most non-technical users have no clue what FTP is. Twenty years ago, some non-technical people knew, because a lot of downloading was going on involving FTP servers, but that was... well, twenty years ago. I do not see the benefit of removing FTP. For security concerns, a big warning as with expired TLS certificates would be an acceptable compromise, IMHO. But as someone who knows what FTP is and still us…

I too agree with the comment I was replying to, "While I agree with removing FTP support", but the marketing-speak is still notable.

I don't think anyone who hasn't heard of FTP is seeking out a browser that specifically does not support it.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#326

Post by antisol »

oblio wrote: post #324
antisol wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way ahead of ya ;) but you didn't address my question

All PDF viewers are crap in my experience. If you don't agree, you haven't used PDF enough. PDF has Javascript as a programming language, it has extensions for 3D models and a ton of other stuff (I think even sound). As a format it's almost as complex as the entire web stack. Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much. That's not a product decisio…

You still haven't addressed my question.

I'd respond to the rest of your vague and incorrect opinions, but why would I do that if you're not even going to bother to address my points despite me asking you to repeatedly?

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#327

Post by raxxorrax »

kragen wrote: post #279
classichasclass wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, yes, it did, until Firefox 61 when FTP subresources were disallowed from HTTPS, and Firefox 70 when HTML pages over FTP were converted to downloads as well.

Disallowing FTP subresources from HTTPS is totally reasonable.

Agreed. How are http resources on https treated these days? I think the last time I checked browsers just printed a warning to console.

Today few resources are found on http though.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#328

Post by raxxorrax »

keyme wrote: post #91

Reminds me of Apple removing the headphone jack and being so proud of themselves for "being brave". Just yesterday I found a link to FTP while researching something. Was pretty annoying to go get another FTP client up and running to get it. Anyway, the movement away from unencrypted protocols to TLS-only is moving us closer to a fully censored internet. Sure, an unencrypted internet did not have any integrity guarant…

Governments will corrupt the TLS chain of trust at some point, so we would be even worse off.

We would have encrypted communication with privileged government access. I think it is actually competition that keeps TLS trustworthy.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#329

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

SFTP or FTPS? Kudos to those that don't need to look up which is which.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#330

Post by klodolph »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #256
klodolph wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can continue to use most command-line FTP programs without problem. Since the terminal is a fairly stable interface, programs written long ago often have no problem compiling and running on modern systems, or only require small changes.

I wouldn’t actually say that, but it may be more of a problem of ecosystem maturity and priorities than it is one of interface stability: I work under Linux and love it, but getting a 20- or 30-year-old program to compile or run under it is surprisingly more painful than doing the same for a Win32 program of similar age, despite the ostensible stability and undeniably better documentation, including that of historica…

I would say it—getting a 20-year-old CLI program to compile and run is often not much trouble at all. Not always, but often.

Even if the program was never written from Linux, you can often get it to compile and run by fixing up headers and making some other minor changes to the source code. I’ve had plenty of success compiling and running programs that were only ever designed to run on IRIX or Solaris or other Unix systems.

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