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The author claims that FTP is disappearing from the Internet because Chrome is going to drop support for it in a future update. The article cites another piece
by Minor49er 6y ago
The author claims that FTP is disappearing from the Internet because Chrome is going to drop support for it in a future update. The article cites another piece that says that Firefox dropped FTP support earlier this year. Both cite security concerns for the reason. Neither mention either SFTP or FTPS. Further, web browsers never needed to be FTP clients, so it makes sense to axe support for them in principle.
There is still a demand for FTP. New FTP-only hosting providers have been popping up in recent years. Companies are also setting up FTP servers to store whatever they need because it's cheap and easy to implement. I even personally incorporated an FTP server in a project that I started on this year. Of course, the author doesn't mention this, nor does he offer any alternatives to it.
- prepend 6y agoBrowsers being able to download ftp protocol links is a really useful function. Security it an odd reason to me to remove this feature as anonymous ftp doesn’t really have much of an issue.
- pixl97 6y agoEh, FTP protocol is a mess, especially in a NAT based world.
- jsilence 6y agoWould like to understand what you mean. Care to elaborate
- magicalhippo 6y agoIt requires a separate port for transferring data. And unless the FTP server supports passive transfers (and they're still out there to this day) that connection is in the opposite direction.
- jsilence 6y agoThanks!
- Minor49er 6y agoI agree about its usefulness. Personally, when I'm using FTP, I seek out a native client anyways. As long as the browser will open up the client when an FTP link is clicked, I think it would be fine. Let the HTTP browsers focus on HTTP. I mean, browsers don't tend to have built in functionality for things like email or phone calls.
- comex 6y agoEven if your connection doesn’t have credentials to steal, anyone who can observe your network traffic can snoop on what files you’re downloading, and a MitM attacker can serve you altered versions of those files. This is especially problematic given that one of the most common remaining use cases for anonymous-FTP-in-browser is downloading software, so there’s a good chance you’re about to execute those potentially-altered files as code. Of course, unencrypted HTTP has the exact same problems – but browsers are trying to deprecate that too, even if they can’t actually remove support anytime soon.
- prepend 6y agoI’m aware of this risk and don’t care. The files I FTP down are things I don’t care about. I don’t think there’s a “good chance” of someone altering the files I download. It’s certainly possible, although unlikely based on the number of times it’s happened to me (0) vs the times I’ve served or retrieved an ftp file (millions, perhaps billions).
- fomine3 6y agoIn the case you're downloading Tor Browser in some countries
- joshstrange 6y ago> Neither mention either SFTP or FTPS They mention SFTP at the very bottom but I agree with everything else you said: > Some of its more prominent use cases, like publicly accessible anonymous FTP servers, have essentially fallen out of vogue. But its primary use case has ultimately been replaced with more secure, more modern versions of the same thing, such as SFTP.
- Minor49er 6y agoGood catch. I'm not sure how I managed to miss that
- microtherion 6y ago> Further, web browsers never needed to be FTP clients I think historically the FTP support existed so you could set up a web site on an FTP server rather, rather than having to run a HTTP server. Early on, having a single browser that could browse HTTP sites, gopher sites, and ftp sites, was a powerful argument.
- tyingq 6y agoThere were a fair amount of ftp urls to software archives at one time, so it was convenient for browsers to be able to use them.
- magicalhippo 6y agoWe have integrations with almost every of our non-trivial customers. The vast majority of those integrations involve files being read/written and transferred. A very popular choice among our customers for transferring these files has been FTP, either via intranet or internet. For a couple of years now FTP usage has fallen dramatically. Our customers now want SFTP, and this demand is not driven by browser support or similar.
- noveltyaccount 6y ago> Further, web browsers never needed to be FTP clients, so it makes sense to axe support for them in principle. Came here to say this. Browsers were always terrible FTP clients. Good riddance!
- hakre 6y agoDrag and drop file uploads always worked very well via FTP. Would be sad to see a degradation on something that was quite inter-operable and stable regardless of Javascript and its various Browser APIs.