Hacker News Reader

Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

As written in another comment, you will find FTP to actually be a truly horrendous protocol, at least from today's perspective. I'm not sure there is anything that FTP offers, that the rsync or sftp, for example, offer much better (or simply HTTP if it's only in one direction), and then some.

SFTP is actually not just FTP over SSH. The protocol is different precisely to get rid of a lot of the outdated nuisances.

View on HN

FTP became a nightmare to use thanks to introduction of NAT, it was developed before NAT existed so it wasn't designed with it in mind.

As for rsync, sftp, scp those are heavily tied to ssh, rsync to the point that you actually ssh to host and call rsync command. rsync has a server mode as well, but almost no one uses it.

Yes, there are lots of issues with FTP. I've worked with it, and it is in many ways a nightmare.

That aside, you can use FTP for auth and ACL in of which HTTP and rsync just aren't capable. I'm not sure this is a flaw in the core protocol so much as the tooling, but there you have it. FTP config syntax may often be byzantine. But it's widely supported (especially on old, low-spec, or embedded devices). For newer stuff, yeah sftp is probably better. But it's still got its uses.

Completely agree it still has its uses. So does Cobol and any number of older legacy tooling.

That’s not the point we are discussing though; This is specifically regarding Chromium supporting FTP.

And that’s also why SFTP is slower than FTP: because it’s a separate protocol implementing its own windowing which interferes with TCP’s, thus performance goes down the toilet when using SFTP over a high latency connection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com