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Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#341

Post by kragen »

jedberg wrote: post #340
antisol wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa... I missed this earlier. >I didn't even notice that I'd been moved to Finder at first. You... can't tell finder from a web browser ?? There goes 100% of your credibility with regard to UX.

You really like to take the worst possible interpretation of whatever someone says, don't you? Of course I can tell the difference between a browser and the finder. My point was the transition was so seamless that I thought Safari was embedding the finder in the Safari window until I looked up at the app bar and realized it had actually switched apps. But feel free to go on dismissing me, since it's clear from your c…

> But feel free to go on dismissing me, since it's clear from your comments that you think no one in the world is right but you.

You know, you're really not in a good position to criticize other people in this conversation with exaggerated complaints about their intellectual arrogance.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#342

Post by kragen »

da_chicken wrote: post #301
antisol wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I just don't see many use cases for FTP anymore I'm seeing this a lot today. It's almost like people have forgotten what FTP stands for. The use case is transferring files. >Why would you choose FTP at this point over HTTP(S), SFTP, BitTorrent, etc.? Because I don't have a client for any of the others installed

> The use case is transferring files. Yes, and it's not particularly unique or well suited to that task over any other protocol. > Because I don't have a client for any of the others installed Then I guess you can use telnet for FTP as well as web browsing.

> Yes, and it's not particularly unique or well suited to that task over any other protocol.

When the files are on an FTP server it is. And given that there are more than a million anonymous FTP servers on the internet today, there are a lot of files that are on FTP servers.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#344

Post by tptacek »

AstralStorm wrote: post #335
Majromax wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secure how? Obtaining a public certificate from a well-known registrar requires Internet connectivity for the ACME protocol, and that's at odds with the other best-security-practice of isolating internal systems like NAS devices well away from general Internet connectivity. The problem is even worse for home routers. They need Internet connectivity to have a chance of obtaining a certificate, but since they provide t…

Solved if DNSSEC is deployed and root certificates are available as they should be pinned. What, you're using old unsigned DNS and complaining about security? Or software so old that pinned certificates are outdated?

Virtually none of the DNS hierarchy signed with DNSSEC, and it's unlikely it ever will be. It's a strange best practice to appeal to, since it's been categorically rejected by almost every security team in the industry.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#345

Post by phkahler »

oblio wrote: post #315
phkahler wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Your web browser doesn't need to support FTP. Your browser doesn't NEED to natively support .pdf but it does and you've probably used that feature. I mean you could have it launch an external .pdf viewer, which is a FAR more complex piece of software than the little FTP protocol code they're disabling here. Your browser doesn't NEED to support TABs. Your OS is already equipped with the ability to run multiple inst…

Q: What do your NEED scenarios have in common? A: Popularity.

Touche. But what Firefox needs is popularity too, and being the last browser to drop a feature used by some niche isnt helping them. I'd argue not to add ftp if it wasn't already there, but why drop it?

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#346

Post by antisol »

jedberg wrote: post #340
antisol wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa... I missed this earlier. >I didn't even notice that I'd been moved to Finder at first. You... can't tell finder from a web browser ?? There goes 100% of your credibility with regard to UX.

You really like to take the worst possible interpretation of whatever someone says, don't you? Of course I can tell the difference between a browser and the finder. My point was the transition was so seamless that I thought Safari was embedding the finder in the Safari window until I looked up at the app bar and realized it had actually switched apps. But feel free to go on dismissing me, since it's clear from your c…

What "worst possible interpretation"? You were the one who claimed you didn't realise you had switched from safari to the finder. Which is exactly equivalent to saying "I have no clue what I'm looking at and pay zero attention to detail". In a conversation where you're discussing those very details.

What's the "good" interpretation? That you suffer from an attention deficit disorder, so it's not your fault that you have no clue what you're looking at and the things you're saying are patently ridiculous?

> I thought Safari was embedding the finder in the Safari window

So, to summarise, your argument is that you have no idea about how your software works or what it does. It felt "seamless" to you because you had no idea what to expect and think your browser magically embeds other applications now.

Just in case I wasn't clear last time: If you think that switching to an entirely different different application is a reasonable thing to miss, you have zero credibility where UX is concerned.

>it's clear from your comments that you think no one in the world is right but you.

Lots of people who aren't me are right. It's just that statistically speaking those people tend to agree with me on most things.

Kragen, for example, has been saying things that are right all day (In particular I found this treatise on security stuff to be damn near sexy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900935).

Even some people who disagree with me on a bunch of points have said things that are right. It's happened today. And you'll see me acknowledge them when they happen if you look.

The reason you haven't seen that is because you haven't said anything that was right.

But if you really believed this assertion you could easily prove it accurate: All you'd need to do is say "OK, yes, I had no clue what I was looking at. I don't know why I thought the finder was in a web browser. I guess I was just confused. That was dumb and inattentive of me". If your theory is accurate I won't be able to agree with that.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#347

Post by antisol »

antisol wrote: post #346
jedberg wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really like to take the worst possible interpretation of whatever someone says, don't you? Of course I can tell the difference between a browser and the finder. My point was the transition was so seamless that I thought Safari was embedding the finder in the Safari window until I looked up at the app bar and realized it had actually switched apps. But feel free to go on dismissing me, since it's clear from your c…

What "worst possible interpretation"? You were the one who claimed you didn't realise you had switched from safari to the finder. Which is exactly equivalent to saying "I have no clue what I'm looking at and pay zero attention to detail". In a conversation where you're discussing those very details. What's the "good" interpretation? That you suffer from an attention deficit disorder, so it's not your fault that you h…

OMG HAHAHAHAHA I just realised that you're the "pretty technical user" who "uses the internet a lot".

bwahahahahaha. Yep. Didn't realise you had switched applications. Real technical.

They have this new thing now for totally technical users like you. It's called a speak-n-spell. You'll love it. And you might not even find it confusing!

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#348

Post by antisol »

antisol wrote: post #314
fomine3 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XUL allows too many modification for browser. It increases attack surface, and it makes hard Firefox developer to modify Firefox's internals to improve things.

you didn't answer my question. I asked how many times you saw this exploited in the wild, not "how would an attack theoretically work".

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Re: Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90

#349

Post by II2II »

tyingq wrote: post #152
II2II wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not what Mozilla is claiming: > The biggest security risk is that FTP transfers data in cleartext, allowing attackers to steal, spoof and even modify the data transmitted. I don't know how realistic that type of attack is and compromised authentication is likely worse, but both are cases that Mozilla cannot fix since they are inherent to the protocol itself.

I guess, but they aren't deprecating http downloads, which have the same problem as anonymous ftp.

For the majority of people, the lack of FTP support would go unnoticed so it is easy to depreciate and remove. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens to HTTP (in general) once a certain threshold has been reached for HTTPS. I also wouldn't be surprised if they start adding warnings about insecure transfer methods for particular file types at a much earlier date.
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