<story><title>Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/07/20/stopping-ftp-support-in-firefox-90/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>FTP has been related to web browsing since the beginning of the web 31 years ago.  For maybe a decade (the first third of the web so far), &lt;i&gt;most&lt;/i&gt; of the WWW was on FTP servers—not just most software downloads, but also most HTML pages.  Web browsers are a &lt;i&gt;much better&lt;/i&gt; interface to FTP servers than dedicated FTP clients, because you can click a link on an HTML page (either a statically generated directory, possibly on the FTP server itself, or a dynamically generated search result page) and get the file from the FTP server.&lt;p&gt;There are a few people commenting with nonsense like this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;You can configure Firefox to open &amp;quot;ftp:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot; links with the client of your choice. This is a non-issue.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s absolutely useless if the client of your choice can&amp;#x27;t render HTML and the ftp:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F; link is to an HTML file.&lt;p&gt;The fundamental idea of the WWW project was that it provided a &lt;i&gt;universal&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;uniform&lt;/i&gt; interface to all the information on the internet, &lt;i&gt;regardless of protocol&lt;/i&gt;.  This move amounts to Firefox abandoning that vision.  Abandoning Gopher was maybe reasonable—there just aren&amp;#x27;t that many Gopher servers out there—but FTP is still a widely used protocol.&lt;p&gt;More broadly, this is a tradeoff between the traditional vision of the WWW as a vast library, in which human knowledge accumulates over time and becomes accessible to all, and the strip-mall vision of the WWW as a means to sell people things they don&amp;#x27;t need.  This move amounts to burning down a wing of the library (or, at least, its card catalog) because it wasn&amp;#x27;t profitable enough.  Or because people keep getting mugged there, I guess.&lt;p&gt;This kind of intentional functionality regression is precisely the kind of thing I use free software to avoid.</text></item><item><author>acabal</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they&amp;#x27;re taking an old feature that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining?&lt;p&gt;Firefox can&amp;#x27;t be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not a great browser and also great FTP client, or a great browser and also a great feed reader, or a great browser and also a great mail client. People using FTP can use a dedicated client, of which there are plenty on every platform, and people who don&amp;#x27;t use FTP (i.e. the vast, vast majority of web browser users) won&amp;#x27;t even notice.&lt;p&gt;A modern web browser is probably some of the most complex software humanity has invented yet, besides a full-scale OS. Taking a maintenance burden that&amp;#x27;s unrelated to the core browser product of a struggling NFP should be welcomed with a sigh of relief.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antisol</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d just like to add to this that ftp is a relatively simple protocol, not particularly complicated to implement. It&amp;#x27;s not a constantly fluctuating standard that requires a team of 50 developers to keep pace with. Supporting FTP isn&amp;#x27;t some big technical challenge. The code has been there in the firefox codebase for nearly 20 years now, running just fine. All you need to do to continue to support ftp is nothing at all. If having the small amount of code to do FTP support in there is making your job really hard, that would seem to indicate to me that you&amp;#x27;re not very good at your job.&lt;p&gt;I also find the incredibly vague and nonspecific &amp;quot;but security!&amp;quot; scaremongering language to be quite hyperbolic, a repeat of the borderline lies mozilla peddled when they decided to dump xul for webextensions.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the removal of features like this amounts to &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t use&amp;#x2F;understand it, therefore I&amp;#x27;m going to assume it&amp;#x27;s not useful to anybody&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Of course, Mozilla being out of touch with its user base is hardly news, so this comes as no surprise at all to me.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;(While I&amp;#x27;m talking about browsers and particularly mozilla, I&amp;#x27;d just like to take a moment to congratulate them on finally getting their market share down below that of edge. They&amp;#x27;ve been working hard at driving firefox into the ground for a long time now, and I&amp;#x27;m sure they must be feeling very proud to have finally achieved this important milestone in their seemingly unending quest to achieve that holy grail of 0 users. So I&amp;#x27;d just like to say: Nice work, Mozilla!)&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/07/20/stopping-ftp-support-in-firefox-90/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>FTP has been related to web browsing since the beginning of the web 31 years ago.  For maybe a decade (the first third of the web so far), &lt;i&gt;most&lt;/i&gt; of the WWW was on FTP servers—not just most software downloads, but also most HTML pages.  Web browsers are a &lt;i&gt;much better&lt;/i&gt; interface to FTP servers than dedicated FTP clients, because you can click a link on an HTML page (either a statically generated directory, possibly on the FTP server itself, or a dynamically generated search result page) and get the file from the FTP server.&lt;p&gt;There are a few people commenting with nonsense like this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;You can configure Firefox to open &amp;quot;ftp:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot; links with the client of your choice. This is a non-issue.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s absolutely useless if the client of your choice can&amp;#x27;t render HTML and the ftp:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F; link is to an HTML file.&lt;p&gt;The fundamental idea of the WWW project was that it provided a &lt;i&gt;universal&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;uniform&lt;/i&gt; interface to all the information on the internet, &lt;i&gt;regardless of protocol&lt;/i&gt;.  This move amounts to Firefox abandoning that vision.  Abandoning Gopher was maybe reasonable—there just aren&amp;#x27;t that many Gopher servers out there—but FTP is still a widely used protocol.&lt;p&gt;More broadly, this is a tradeoff between the traditional vision of the WWW as a vast library, in which human knowledge accumulates over time and becomes accessible to all, and the strip-mall vision of the WWW as a means to sell people things they don&amp;#x27;t need.  This move amounts to burning down a wing of the library (or, at least, its card catalog) because it wasn&amp;#x27;t profitable enough.  Or because people keep getting mugged there, I guess.&lt;p&gt;This kind of intentional functionality regression is precisely the kind of thing I use free software to avoid.</text></item><item><author>acabal</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand all the negativity around this. People complained when Firefox added Pocket, in part because they took a browser extension and made it a feature that was ostensibly unrelated to web browsing. Now they&amp;#x27;re taking an old feature that&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; not related to web browsing and removing it, and people are still complaining?&lt;p&gt;Firefox can&amp;#x27;t be everything. It should focus on being a great browser and not a great browser and also great FTP client, or a great browser and also a great feed reader, or a great browser and also a great mail client. People using FTP can use a dedicated client, of which there are plenty on every platform, and people who don&amp;#x27;t use FTP (i.e. the vast, vast majority of web browser users) won&amp;#x27;t even notice.&lt;p&gt;A modern web browser is probably some of the most complex software humanity has invented yet, besides a full-scale OS. Taking a maintenance burden that&amp;#x27;s unrelated to the core browser product of a struggling NFP should be welcomed with a sigh of relief.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamadatix</author><text>Firefox didn&amp;#x27;t support directly opening and rendering HTML files via ftp:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F; URLs anyways, it&amp;#x27;d just download them like a normal FTP client. I can&amp;#x27;t even remember the last browser I used that supported that. You can&amp;#x27;t kill what has been dead for decades already.</text></comment>