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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

#71

Post by CGamesPlay »

userbinator wrote: post #66

Considering that Google (search) still lists plenty of FTP results, many of which have been extremely useful to me, this seems like another move to bully the Internet into what Google wants it to be. Will it start removing those results, effectively censoring another huge chunk of the Internet? It's already hard enough to find older/more obscure information, and FTP sites are more likely to be in that category. Also,…

FTP support is still a big attack surface for the client that has to be managed, regardless of wire security.

But my gut reaction to reading this concern is actually: why do you think this is “bullying” and not “opening the door for a niche competitor”?

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#72

Post by jpindar »

pedrocx486 wrote: post #57
foobarbecue wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows comes with an ftp client? Not that I know of. Unless you mean MS Edge? Oh or I guess there's a command line one. It's not integrated into Windows Explorer, though.

Windows Explorer can navigate (and transfer files) on FTPs. Type "ftp://ip.addr.of.ftp" in explorer and you're in. :-)

Huh, so it can. I never knew that.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#73

Post by ahupp »

subsubsub wrote: post #4

Google don't want users, they want pliant consumers. The idea that young people know more about tech than their parents will become less and less true in the future.

Why do you assume this is driven by some desire for "pliant consumers", vs a desire to build a simpler and more secure browser?

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#74

Post by notatoad »

tim58 wrote: post #50
morpheuskafka wrote: post #8

I'm personally fine with this. FTP is a different protocol, just like BitTorrent. It's not part of the modern web, so it's just another loose end to tie up. Even though it will be around for a while, it's not relevant to Chrome's user audience/usecase.

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.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#75

Post by takeda »

systematical wrote: post #17
subsubsub wrote: post #4

Google don't want users, they want pliant consumers. The idea that young people know more about tech than their parents will become less and less true in the future.

Use a proper client like Filezilla for this and go over SFTP, no reason for FTP these days and even less so in a browser.

There is[1], but yeah it doesn't apply in this context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#76

Post by namibj »

m463 wrote: post #56
Someone1234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think multiplexing commands and data was probably not as well solved a problem as it is now. Having worked with ssh/scp/sftp, I think sftp could be better too, and therefore more useful. It's intimately entwined with ssh, which means that instead of just transferring files, you have to give out ssh permissions where they're not required. Really, there should be an sftp client and server, strictly dealing with…

_nothing_ prevents you from doing that though. It's already implemented, even. Write-only might be hard, and could require eBPF hooking of open(2) with a filter to check if the permissions are correct.

Read only isn't a problem, as denying writes and allowing reads is a trivial part of unix filesystems.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#77

Post by mlyle »

cameronbrown wrote: post #65
mlyle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a lot harder to become technically competent these days. Before, computers compelled you to have a certain level of technical competence to be a user. Now, the barrier to entry is a lot lower, but there aren't many of the very young learning their way around command lines, etc. The resources once you are on the track to doing technical stuff are far better, but you're less likely to end up on that track-…

> Now, the barrier to entry is a lot lower, but there aren't many of the very young learning their way around command lines, etc. I'm a fairly young person. What I've seen over the past few years is technology is finally useful and accessible to everyone. Forcing people to use the command line isn't a useful skill for 99.5% of people anymore, it's just senseless gatekeeping to make it a computer requirement. I got in…

I think you missed my point.

Before, a huge portion of the population was using computers and had to peek under the hood. This means you got a lot more people who got curious about how the machine worked very early on.

I am teaching STEM stuff to kids these days-- programming in Scratch and python, etc. My friends and I, back in the day, were all poking around memory, rekeying Basic programs from magazines and moving on to writing Turbo Pascal programs, etc, at a pretty early age. I don't see this with the kids I teach. There's not as good of a path/funnel there, and I'm not sure whether the stuff we do to e.g. teach programming in elementary school, etc, are analogous exercises in computational thinking.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#78

Post by jeffk_teh_haxor »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #19
kccqzy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one really uses FTP to transmit anything secret or confidential. Most of the time the password to that FTP server is just "guest" and the same file can also be retrieved by HTTP without authentication.

I work at a bank (opinions my own) and nearly everything we do (including modernization, but especially partnership communications) is FTP-based. It's just about the only real standard available when the code is older than most of the devs. We do use modern encryption and mutual TLS to authenticate and encrypt everything, including before password transmission when that's even an option, but FTP is still the backbone…

You're probably using dedicated FTP clients, right? FTP browsing on a web browser is a hack. Uploading files, downloading multiple files at a time, doing _anything_ is just pure pain.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#79

Post by mlyle »

sophiebits wrote: post #46
mlyle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a lot harder to become technically competent these days. Before, computers compelled you to have a certain level of technical competence to be a user. Now, the barrier to entry is a lot lower, but there aren't many of the very young learning their way around command lines, etc. The resources once you are on the track to doing technical stuff are far better, but you're less likely to end up on that track-…

You used to need a certain amount of technical competence to be literate. Now we teach everyone to read and write! What is the world coming to?

That's hardly what I said.

It's good that computers are more accessible. But by making it easy, we're providing less opportunity for people who are curious about innards at an early age.

Of course, now we're teaching computational thinking in schools, but IMO it's a really big open question whether our attempts to teach that work, especially in elementary school.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#80

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #71
userbinator wrote: post #66

Considering that Google (search) still lists plenty of FTP results, many of which have been extremely useful to me, this seems like another move to bully the Internet into what Google wants it to be. Will it start removing those results, effectively censoring another huge chunk of the Internet? It's already hard enough to find older/more obscure information, and FTP sites are more likely to be in that category. Also,…

FTP support is still a big attack surface for the client that has to be managed, regardless of wire security. But my gut reaction to reading this concern is actually: why do you think this is “bullying” and not “opening the door for a niche competitor”?

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).
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