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Comment by daxuak | Hacker News Reader

FTP might be dying in other sectors, but at least in biomed research, I would use FTP anyday when the alternative protocol needs a client app and a bunch of configurations. It's also handy when sharing data.

Browser support is important here because those files are often not explored from command line etc, but rather the FTP links are placed on individual pages as a quick download. At least for me, it's much more convinient to click and wget, than reading a page then switch window to query from API/client...

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FTP is still heavily used in the energy industry too. We upload an enormous amount of minute-by-minute meter data at work via FTP to various energy providers.

You should probably report this as a data breach, since meter data sounds like personal data, and FTP isn't encrypted.

And you aren't using Firefox anyway, it has never supported FTP uploads.

I'm not sure if you're trying to be antagonistic with this reply or not. I also didn't feel it was important for me to outline the entirety of the data pipeline -- I merely wanted to point out that FTP is still in heavy use in some industries.

To address your concerns though: meter data is not ingested via FTP. That's done using other protocols. It's transferred b2b via FTP over private tunnels. And you're correct Firefox is not used for uploading data. If it were possible it wouldn't even be a good choice given the volume of data we deal with. It is, however, used heavily for accessing the uploaded data by Operations and other teams.

Why not rsync, scp, https, or any other plethora of much better alternatives?

The former two (rsync, scp) are a lot more complex than ftp(s), since they both rely on at least some subset of ssh, plus some other stuff. They're not really suited for safely linking to unauthenticated downloads, either.

https doesn't let you also manage your files with the same protocol/daemon without other stuff on top of, or alongside, it.

When is the "complexity" of SSH ever a problem? If you need a tiny implementation for an embedded device, use dropbear instead of OpenSSH.

WebDAV lets you manage files over the same protocol (but.. why?)

> When is the "complexity" of SSH ever a problem? If you need a tiny implementation for an embedded device, use dropbear instead of OpenSSH.

We're in a thread concerning the removal of FTP from Firefox because having extra code around you don't strictly need is, the argument goes, expensive and dangerous. Given the context, I don't think any justification for extra complexity being, per se, something worth worrying about, is needed.

Maybe I should've put it this way: ff (sometimes?) won't force ftp to use https, had to manually correct it if the url happens to start with ftp://ftp.*. And outside of NCBI, when occasionally sharing >10GB data, ftp (because of inertia) has been handy than the more proper ways and could have no https support.

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