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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

> FTP support has been removed

sigh

It's my initial reaction too, but if I stop to think of Firefox as a huge, difficult-to-manage project where each feature costs dev resources and increases security risk, FTP support is probably the feature I wouldn't mind removed right next to the Pocket integration.

On the one hand I'm OK with removing features to keep the browser slim. OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep.

[EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things like federated social networks more visibility and better prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted integration with the browser). That might also, you know, differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in the early days.

> OTOH Firefox is vastly fatter than it was in its early versions, which supported FTP (and Gopher!), so it doesn't seem like FTP or other minor protocols are an actual cause of complexity- and bloat-creep.

I’m sure someone will correct me, but without looking at the source code, I suspect the following will have played a role in increasing code size since the earliest days of Phoenix:

* support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF

* DRM maybe?

* WebGL

* SVG?

* The complexity of modern CSS

Much, much bigger JS engine/sandbox, probably. Backwards compat with an ever-growing set of HTML, CSS, and JS. I'd guess a modern CSS engine is several times (dozens of times?) larger than what Phoenix shipped with. I expect their internal UI-drawing code/framework is a lot larger than in the Phoenix days. Webassembly. Canvas. And yeah, several of the other things you mentioned—video used to be the responsibility of plugins, for example.

[EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as terrible ideas when Phoenix was released, because they would kill performance, since they're so much more expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because they're so much more taxing on the client than raster. CSS doing animations would have been considered insane, fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but very niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so slow and resource-hungry....

Or Wasm, or WebRTC, or indexedDB ... plus anything else on that long list:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

Firefox supporting Gemini would be awesome.

I don't think my estimate of the cost of FTP maintenance would be as high as yours. Why do you think FTP would still be such a cost at this stage?

I'm curious what your estimate would be.

Mine would be somewhere between 0.5FTE assuming the bare minimum of keep-the-lights-on QA testing for each release and ongoing bug triage up to maybe 3FTE if it requires periodic security and design updates to keep up with changing standards/platforms/protocols.

The Pocket integration should be about the last thing removed: Independent revenue streams are something Firefox desperately needs.

IMO browser should focus on HTTP/HTML support. There are plenty of protocols and there are plenty of programs with proper support for those protocols. I don't see nothing wrong with using transmission for torrents, WinSCP for FTP, etc.

I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers when users need to install and open different applications for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared objects).

That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.

In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.

Turns out though, they're coming up with a way to support basically any TCP based protocol via WebTransport:

https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md

It’s a terrible protocol not built for the modern internet. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a URL containing “ftp” that isn’t prefixed by http://

Lots of university file dumps are served on FTP...

I used to add '+"index of"' when searching for files or dumps using google. It still works, but definitely not as good as a few years ago.

A past time: typing '+"index of" main.dfm' to see what people were developing using delphi.

'+"index of" dire straits sultans of swing mp3' still kind of works.

I have tested and still works even with actual and a bit obscure software

and a lot more, it's a bit sad to lose ftp

Why not use an ftp client if you want to use ftp?

Don't know why this comment is being downvoted. I'd prefer to use another client like Transmit or Cyberduck. Having it all in one browser introduces complexity I don't think the team at Mozilla wants.

I was at the meeting and they simply preferred to add more people to the tab redesign rather than the FTP code.

Why having <video> why having MIME

With no HTTP alternative? Most FTP servers that I saw also had HTTP support.

I use FileZilla anytime I need to access FTP.

It somehow feels wrong to use a web browser for this.

It was a convenience but one I can live without. Purely from a LOC view ripping out features from browsers is something I welcome.

Should become extensions then. That’s why they were invented, no?

I'm actually ok with this. I'm happy to have it open those links in my dedicated tool just like it does with bittorrent links, etc.

Honestly, I'm more than happy to see older/niche protocols removed from web browsers. God knows the average browser contains way, way too much stuff anyway[0], not to mention there are FTP clients that are likely far better for that use case than Firefox would ever be. I wouldn't mind if FF (or other browsers) tightened their scope a little more often and adhered to the Unix philosophy a little more closely.

0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

Did you use it?

Obviously not as much as HTTP(s) but still there are FTP links which show up after a google search from time to time...I guess now I have to context switch to the file explorer...Thunar is OK but does Windows Explorer even support FTP?

There are more mailto: links on the web than ftp: ones, and yet most browsers don't natively do email.

Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled outside the browser.

I thought mailto links would open in webmail if configured?

You're getting my point. ftp links will open in an ftp client if configured.

FTP and HTTP are both about transfering files, SMTP is a very different use case.

Use your imagination. And this list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_network_protocols

The rare times I've needed FTP on Windows, I've found Cyberduck sufficient to do the job.

If you don't mind an abysmal speed (due to small buffer size), then Windows Explorer can access FTP (but no FTPS).

Windows' File Explorer briefly flirted with WebDAV (and still sort of supports it for backward compatibility reasons, but using it is harder than ever for new things and the buggy WebDAV implementation is mostly frozen with its early oughts idea of WebDAV quirks). It never supported FTP, because it skipped FTP for WebDAV.

Now that File Explorer has a 9p file server (from Plan 9) built in for WSL1/2 support, I wonder if you could hack together good Plan 9 style FTP support for File Explorer. I don't think the 9p server is that easy to talk to directly, though. (You could of course just do a Linux mount to FTP in WSL and maybe accomplish that through two step indirection, but I'd imagine doing something more directly in 9p would be preferable.)

I haven't tested up to more modern versions but explorer at least up to Vista had an ftp client built in, albeit not a very good one.

Edit: Just tested on Win 10 1809, ftp support is still built-in to file explorer.

Personally, I've always just associated ftp:// with my preferred client and the browser just opens my client for me when I hit one. Works pretty good.

I've just switched to using my file manager for FTP. Works fine.

Have they mentioned the reason of its removal somewhere?

It's insecure by default, the TLS-enabled version has never been widely adopted, never been supported by browsers and has some horrible security problems of its own (see alpaca attack).

Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer HTTPS.

Ahh FTP. The original “cloud storage”.

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