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Comment by tim58 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not fine with this.

I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today. This is a breaking change on a critical piece of internet infrastructure. Google, by nature of operating the most popular web browser, has a moral obligation to the community to provide a stable environment.

There are something like 10^9 webpages out there. How many of these will become less accessible because of this change? Many well maintained webpages will have to expend resources to migrate off ftp. Less maintained webpages with FTP links will not be updated and put the burden of installing an FTP client on the user, reducing accessibility.

This is Google externalizing the cost of updating their software by forcing everyone else to update their webpages to following Google's specification.

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> I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today.

I'm of the mindset that it should be possible to rub code written 20 years ago, but not always the same way you run code written more recently. Emulation, virtual machines etc all allow access to old work without hobbling future development with backwards compatibility concerns (see: Windows).

In this case, there are plenty of free and open source options for FTP clients. No one is going to have the world closed off to them as a result of this.

A large number of academic labs share data by hosting it over FTP. You can harp on about better methods or whatever but these people do not care and don't have time/energy to start caring.

Can’t Chrome just hand the ftp:// link over to a dedicated client?

Sure Chrome can. However this reduces accessibility. What if someone has never heard of FTP? Learning about it and installing an FTP client is a large barrier compared to starting a download. Reducing accessibility is a breaking change IMO.

The same argument could be used for not showing PDF files in the browser.

IMO, browsers need to concern themselves with HTTP. Anything else gets handed off to an application that's designed for it.

They can also just not upgrade their browser, then. If they don't have the time/energy they're probably still on IE anyway.

> They can also just not upgrade their browser, then

This is a very silly response.

New versions are released with security fixes, not just new features.

They wouldn't be using FTP is they care about security.

I don't get why there is so much resistance. It's an old, outdated technology that has to be replaced eventually. Yes, change is always painful. But this isn't like with RSS were the tech provided clear benefits we would loose.

> They wouldn't be using FTP is they care about security.

????

Using FTP doesn't put your computer at increased risk of being hacked.

Not updating your browser _DOES_ put your computer at increased risk of being hacked.

FTP is not a secure protocol. That's why SFTP was made, even though it isn't really anything like FTP.

In any case, integrating FTP in your browser absolutely increases your chances of an exploit, though. When was the last time the FTP code was tested? Or worked on at all? I suspect it will have been a very long time.

> They can also just not upgrade their browser, then.

Even aside from everything else, Chrome auto-updates and it’s very difficult to disable.

Brb, forgot to rub my code today.

>I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today.

Given that chrome didn't exist 20 years ago, this seems like a fairly absurd position to apply to this situation. No code from 20 years ago relies on chrome having ftp support.

The number 20 is probably an upper bound.

Web browsers existed 20 years ago. We should be able to visit and use a website written in 1999 on any modern browser.

and you can. but an FTP dump is not a website, and a browser not having native support for non-http protocols does not break websites.

FTP links will still work, they just won't be displayed in a browser anymore. People are blowing this way out of proportion, as if FTP is some critical underpinning of the web or web browsers are a critical part of FTP. Web browsers have always been terrible FTP clients, anybody who uses FTP on a regular basis uses a better client. The most tangible impact of this change is to give grumpy internet commenters something to complain about.

Chrome didn't exist 20 years ago, but you can trace its lineage back that far. Khtml dates back to 1998 apparently.

Frankly, I take the opposite view. Code that is not supported from a developer standpoint should be deprecated. If an organization doesn't want to spend the resources to support part of a code base, I support excising that part of the code base from the product. Especially in open source, others are free to fork.

Google Chrome is proprietary. Chromium is open source. You cant just directly fork Google Chrome itself. However, Chromiums development goals are hijacked by Google Chromes motives. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

The same could have been said of Gopher. FTP is typically insecure and painful to use with it's varying port maps. Transferring files over HTTP or more modern protocols is the future.

Transferring files over HTTP or more modern protocols is the future

My direct and blunt rebuttal is "I don't care". The future is worthless without the present, and more importantly, the past. The continued effective destruction of history that these big tech companies are doing with their actions is a disturbing trend.

Why doesn't HN support http login then? It's part of the spec.

A platform should support the entire spec. An app should correctly implement the parts of the spec it chooses.

FTP in PASV mode operates very similarly to HTTP, and is no more insecure. With an organization the size of Google and the Chrome team, they should be able to make it work.

Honest question: Has anyone not used FTP in PASV mode in the last 20 years over the internet?

I think it's pretty much a given since most clients change to PASV mode as a first step. And it's rare that people have a port open to them (behind all firewalls, etc)

Not all servers work with passive mode. For active, the onus on keeping it working is on me -- and that's easy, it's a trivial bit of firewall config. (conntrack_ftp)

The same was said of Gopher. When Mozilla dropped support for the protocol in Firefox 4.0, there was a brief outcry, followed by silence as everyone realized that the protocol had been effectively unused for decades already.

Except ftp is alive.

>The same could have been said of Gopher.

I don't think Chrome ever supported Gopher, but if some other browser removed something that worked fine before I wouldn't like it either.

Firefox did remove its support for it, but the support could easily be added back with an extension.

I am more worried about the very realistic that that Google would be dropping FTP from search results, seeing as how their users won't be able to open them in the Google browser.

> I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today

I believe otherwise. Let the old die, so we can alleviate ourselves to create something more suitable to our times.

You are considering only one aspect of a complex decision they have made. It costs real people-hours to maintain any software. Is it the best use of the time of some very capable people? Like, they might develop some software instead that will save your life a year from now. Then you would think differently.

We should stop telling others what they SHOULD do. (Crap I just did.) Anyways, why not contact Google and offer them to pay the costs of maintaining every piece of software they ever decide to deprecate? Or just go on and build a better browser if you can.

>I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today.

So you would have cp/m, MS-DOS, PDP-11 RSX-11M, Coherent, Vax VMS, old broken compilers for dead languages, IBM 360 TOS (yes, tape operating system), IBM 360 DOS, Sigma 5 Real-Time-Batch monitor, autocoder, 1401 software, Palm OS?

But for the love of all that is Balloons and Seashells, why?

More to the point--did Chrome have FTP 20 years ago? No, it did not.

In my opinion, they should have never put it there in the first place.

> Many well maintained webpages will have to expend resources to migrate off ftp

Really, though? Are there any examples of any web pages that are strictly available from FTP instead of HTTP? If so, why? Isn’t HTTP made specifically for the purpose of transporting hypertext? Why use another, more general protocol when you can use the one made specifically for your use case?

I’m sure there’s good stuff on FTP still. I really, really doubt people are throwing SPAs and PWAs on FTP servers though.

I scrape municipal data sources of food and building code violations for a side project, much of the data is only available over FTP. I discovered several other cities’ data URLs by searching Google’s FTP index.

Then use a different browser, because Chromium is not and never has been of the preservationist mindset you're talking about.

I do. Chromium/Chrome has a huge impact on the entire web ecosystem, to the point that they have an impact on people that do not use their products.

I'm grateful for that. Why should I cheerlead efforts to keep technology mired in the 1970s? That's what FTP is: a 1970s design, and not in a good way.

> I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today.

It's OK if some of the more antiquated parts of the web die off. I don't want to have to support old Flash loading screens, I don't need AOL instant messenger status badges, or iFramed in MySpace comments, and I don't need to open FTP in my browser. Most users these days wouldn't even know how to use this via browser... ftp://myname:mypassword@123.123.123.123... it's just a relic.

Anyone who wants to use FTP knows how to download a program for it. We don't need it in Chrome.

I think a lot of people see it as a slippery slope. Of course FTP is not so common, but what if at some point they remove the ability to visit general URLs and just let you either google search or go to a page you've already visited.

Sadly a decent fraction of users might just accept something like this, even though it would be a major step backwards for internet freedom.

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