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> the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disag
by bscphil 5y ago
> the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug
I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages".
The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.