5 ms·

It's unfortunate that this had to happen, but the landscape around FTP is increasingly unexamined and part of a dead era. The effort required to build in robus

by trangus_1985 5y ago

It's unfortunate that this had to happen, but the landscape around FTP is increasingly unexamined and part of a dead era. The effort required to build in robust SFTP support as well as convert existing FTP users to it is non-trivial, and not within the charter of a modern web browser. It's sad, but not surprising.

tyingq 5y ago
"not within the charter of a modern web browser" That barrier seems pretty porous these days. Being that you can access serial ports via JS, for example :)
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Hmmm... would it be possible to write an ftp client in browser JS? I think probably not.
  - liketochill 5y ago
    I don’t program web sites or web browsers, but with wasm or web sockets can’t you make a web page that opens a connection and sends arbitrary binary data to another server without any http?
    - notamy 5y ago
      > but with wasm or web sockets can’t you make a web page that opens a connection and sends arbitrary binary data to another server without any http? I can't speak to WASM, but websockets are literally just a layer over HTTP in some regards -- a websocket connection is initiated by sending an HTTP request with the Upgrade header.
      - ForHackernews 5y ago
        You watch, eventually everything be a layer over HTTPS[0], and 443 will be the only port. RIP Internet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS
    - handrous 5y ago
      Last I checked you'd still be speaking HTTP (even if it's "WebSockets"), not raw TCP. Certainly there's no UDP support. You'd need a translating proxy of some kind.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      No. WebSockets are a specific protocol tunneled over HTTP, not raw sockets, and WASM doesn't expose any functionality which wasn't already available to JS.
      - liketochill 5y ago
        Webrtc?
        tyingq 5y ago
        You could make something similar to FTP with that, but it wouldn't be interoperable. Web browsers just don't expose a generic socket api where you can specify ports, bind(), listen(), accept(), connect(), and so on. So you can't make generic socket clients or servers. XHR, websockets, webrtc, and so on might be able to connect to a specific port, but they send things that would cause errors, and can't send/receive arbitrarily crafted sequences of data.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    Yes, you can build an FTP client in JavaScript. However the browser won't let you escape the sandbox and open an arbitrary port ... but on Node.js or FirefoxOS (haha) there shouldn't be a problem, except weirdness in standard interpretation :)

tyingq 5y ago

"not within the charter of a modern web browser" That barrier seems pretty porous these days. Being that you can access serial ports via JS, for example :)

jrochkind1 5y ago
Hmmm... would it be possible to write an ftp client in browser JS? I think probably not.
- liketochill 5y ago
  I don’t program web sites or web browsers, but with wasm or web sockets can’t you make a web page that opens a connection and sends arbitrary binary data to another server without any http?
  - notamy 5y ago
    > but with wasm or web sockets can’t you make a web page that opens a connection and sends arbitrary binary data to another server without any http? I can't speak to WASM, but websockets are literally just a layer over HTTP in some regards -- a websocket connection is initiated by sending an HTTP request with the Upgrade header.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      You watch, eventually everything be a layer over HTTPS[0], and 443 will be the only port. RIP Internet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS
  - handrous 5y ago
    Last I checked you'd still be speaking HTTP (even if it's "WebSockets"), not raw TCP. Certainly there's no UDP support. You'd need a translating proxy of some kind.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    No. WebSockets are a specific protocol tunneled over HTTP, not raw sockets, and WASM doesn't expose any functionality which wasn't already available to JS.
    - liketochill 5y ago
      Webrtc?
      - tyingq 5y ago
        You could make something similar to FTP with that, but it wouldn't be interoperable. Web browsers just don't expose a generic socket api where you can specify ports, bind(), listen(), accept(), connect(), and so on. So you can't make generic socket clients or servers. XHR, websockets, webrtc, and so on might be able to connect to a specific port, but they send things that would cause errors, and can't send/receive arbitrarily crafted sequences of data.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  Yes, you can build an FTP client in JavaScript. However the browser won't let you escape the sandbox and open an arbitrary port ... but on Node.js or FirefoxOS (haha) there shouldn't be a problem, except weirdness in standard interpretation :)