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Comment by gone35 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed; by the same "security" logic, why not get rid of HTTP too then? (Or SMTP, for that matter?)

The point of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is to do precisely that: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful -- long tails included. But I guess for them it's not...

(Also, I can't believe the Chrome team is so strapped it can't afford to support or harden the feature, as some in the bug tracker suggest [1]. This is Google we are talking about, not some tiny open source project!)

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=333943

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If I imagine I'm in a position as a developer / project manager / whatever working for Google trying to advocate Google committing resources to the FTP protocol in Google Chrome, I'm struggling to think of a way of promoting it that shows it will have a return on investment.

How do you display ads while someone is accessing an FTP server?

ftp://example.com/directory/file.extension can be a link in a website, where the website displays ads.

I'm just imagining some people having a conversation that goes something like this:

"The funding for this feature has been removed because we can't serve ads on a page like this https://imgur.com/20ooI9f "

Edit: grammar

Chrome, being a browser made by an advertising company, could show ads on ftp directory listings.

In that sense, it's somewhat strange that Chrome isn't already presenting us with ads in the tab-/addressbar and the menu. Perhaps some pop-ups from the bottom and sides as well while they are at it? The original free/shareware version of Opera had that too, and it wasn't that intrusive.

I thought you were joking for a minute and then sadly realized you weren’t.

Mozilla certainly would like that new influx of users. I think user retention is one of Googles most immediate issues.

> Indeed; by the same "security" logic, why not get rid of HTTP too then? (Or SMTP, for that matter?)

I believe those will happen, in the long run.

The next HTTP spec includes mandatory SSL, and Google had a hand in designing QUIC, and Google has been deprecating traditional SMTP authorisation.

They don't have resources to fix cross-origin network request debugging either. It's quite sad.

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