FTP is no going to go away, just like the other so called old protocols.

It has been disabed in Firefox by default for a while now, I'm quite sure. It's my default browser and for a very long time all FTP links required an external application to open. I guess they are now completely removing it.. Understandable, plain FTP is a very insecure protocol.

FTP has not been working in Chrome or Edge for quite a while now. I've been using FileZilla exclusively for ftp since they broke it in the browsers... Either that or MS broke it in the browsers in Windows 10.

null

Flashget classic from cnet has site explorer for ftp great way into ftp from dos windows and NT windows. I used it yesterday from windows 10 x64.

Anders- wrote on 2021-07-26, 07:21:

Don't see why folks get all upset and say "FTP is insecure". It's not intented to be secure (for that there's FTPS).

I prefer SFTP, but the ideas behind them are similar.

Anders- wrote on 2021-07-26, 07:21:

FTP is all about being effective at transferring files, and in many cases the downloaded file is verified by sha256 or similar anyway.

I think the important thing here is how secure it is for the server. To me the only applicable case of FTP is for anonymous read-only access to hosted files. If the protocol is secure enough so that a malicious entity cannot gain privileged access to the server and compromise it / take it down, I'm willing to live with the risk of man-in-the-middle attack, since I can do SHA verification. With that said, the typical user may not be aware of it, so a man-in-the-middle attack is a concern, and may be a good case against raw FTP.

Anders- wrote on 2021-07-26, 07:21:

There are of course a bunch of dedicated programs for ftp, but having the possibility to use the web browser to download a couple of files is convenient.

Agree. It's just so much easier, and I was disappointed to learn that my main browser no longer offers this, on the few occasions in the last couple of years I wanted to grab a few files.

I don't know when was the last time I downloaded something over FTP (not counting file transfers on my home network, but then I didn't use the browser).
The removal of RSS feed support was more painful for me.

Are they going to remove it from Waterfox as well?

Couldn't a plugin/extension be made to provide ftp client functionality ?

darry wrote on 2021-07-26, 16:00:

Couldn't a plugin/extension be made to provide ftp client functionality ?

Yes, they made the necessary changes so that FTP calls can be picked up by addons.

Bad news, indeed.
The insecurity of FTP is totally irrelevant for sharing public stuff via anonymous FTP.

Anyway, now, when browsers drop FTP support, expect FTP servers also getting shut down.
Yes, there's nothing new about this - good old FTP sites were being replaced by modern-and-retarded websites for many years now.
But now, this process is sure to speed up.
And some stuff, currently available via FTP, won't get migrated to modern services - primarily the older stuff, like drivers for no-longer-supported hardware.

DOWNLOAD ALL THE VALUABLE STUFF FROM FTP SERVERS WHILE YOU CAN!

null

The sky is falling!

I remember when web browsers never had ftp functionality.

I knew a few months ago, before v90 was even released. Icon layout for FTP was broken in Firefox for years, though.

For browsing FTP servers, I use either Pale Moon (too lazy to remove it from the machine; uses very old Firefox release as base) or SeaMonkey (uses Firefox ESR release as base).

I use an entirely different machine to archive FTP servers; lftp is used to do so.

null

Hokay, I'm trying this service... https://onlineftp.ch/ doesn't appear to be doing anything rude or nasty, you never know if they'll get hacked though, but appears useful at the moment.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-26, 19:17:

The sky is falling!

Reminds me of that song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvXTC7LeIMI

😀

Grzyb wrote on 2021-07-26, 18:53:

Bad news, indeed.
The insecurity of FTP is totally irrelevant for sharing public stuff via anonymous FTP.

DOWNLOAD ALL THE VALUABLE STUFF FROM FTP SERVERS WHILE YOU CAN!

Heed this warning, please download FTP archives of useful old files before they're axed for good.

Very bad, when things are expunged without the consequences being fully thought about.

This is more artificial than anything of course, as leaving FTP in would hurt *nobody* and help many. But, no like the recent terrible IMDB.com changes, they eliminate what worked well before with a new version which takes away many of the useful features. Like DOS binaries have been arbitrarily thrown away just becacuse DOS is "obsolete" in programs which *could* still be compiled to run in DOS (RPGs, emulators, MAME, etc)

FTP servers are a good "backup" reposititory. But, since the FTPsearch engines have all disappeared, it's difficult to search for an exact filename anymore. Still, we're about to lose TONS of old drivers, DOS files, utilities, etc, so hopefully some kind souls who believe in software preservation will make mirrors of some of these FTP sites available over http, torrent, or whatever.

Wayback doesn't preserve ftp sites, either.

Found this:
https://www.trishtech.com/2021/07/set-winscp- … irefox-browser/

It's hilarious how they complain about FTP security while ads and malicious sites and links continue to be allowed, of course there's money in those. I hate BS excuses just call a spade a spade geesh.