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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 abou

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 of a ton of big older businesses.

darrenf 7y ago
I too work at a company/in an industry where FTP (incl. sftp/ftps) is still crucial, for both inbound and outbound transfers. A great many of our partners would find using other protocols more cumbersome. Automating the download/upload of entire directories of arbitrarily named files seems considerably easier/to require less code than any solution over HTTP might (log in, perhaps change directory, `prompt`, then `mget/mput *`). Albeit I've not done much research into alternative means recently, but a dedicated protocol beats a hand rolled solution and anyway inertia is strong - especially as (for us) nothing is transferred in either direction that isn't destined to be made public by one party. This is tangential to whether support for FTP is still worth keeping in a web browser, mind.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  SFTP is different from FTP, though. As far as I know, it's a fine protocol.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Lots of SFTP clients are good at mput. If we're limiting ourselves to HTTP, WebDAV is pretty nice and has builtin support across Windows, Mac, and most Linux distributions.
jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
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.