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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

No, they're breaking with accessing a part of the internet that web browsers used to support, an no one does anymore. They are most certainly not break the web itself. These are different things: if you need FTP (and let's be real: you don't), then as a user you still have TONS of options available to you, and as a host even legacy systems using ancient versions of Apache can already serve file listings as standard web pages. Just turn that on.

Your web browser doesn't need to support FTP. It just needs to support the web. Everything else is a bonus, unless it's a security liability. Then it has no business being in there.

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>> Your web browser doesn't need to support FTP.

Your browser doesn't NEED to natively support .pdf but it does and you've probably used that feature. I mean you could have it launch an external .pdf viewer, which is a FAR more complex piece of software than the little FTP protocol code they're disabling here.

Your browser doesn't NEED to support TABs. Your OS is already equipped with the ability to run multiple instances.

Your browser doesn't NEED to sandbox anything, you could just run each instance in it's own VM.

Your browser doesn't NEED to play video, it could launch an external viewer.

While you are completely right in your statements, I could argue that http and ftp are a means of transport and not part of UI or UX.

Q: What do your NEED scenarios have in common?

A: Popularity.

Touche. But what Firefox needs is popularity too, and being the last browser to drop a feature used by some niche isnt helping them. I'd argue not to add ftp if it wasn't already there, but why drop it?

It's probably the largest in-use uri scheme they have dropped. At the very least, there should be better error handling. For me on Chrome/Windows, ftp:// uris just don't do anything[1]. No error, they are just inoperable links. Yes, I could fix that, but for average users, that part of whatever you want to call it could just disappear silently.

[1] Because the default handler for ftp:// was originally Chrome on my system, which is pretty common. Chrome dropping it didn't change that mapping.

I certainly was not viewing Gopher pages at the time they dropped gopher support. I was rather perplexed after updating when FTP didn't work. Turns out some downloads are still on FTP.

Proper solution is to direct the user of unknown protocol scheme to the vetted app store or a catalog.

But wait, Windows does that since Vista, except like everything it's faulty.

> (and let's be real: you don't)

OMG! Look, everyone: a telepath! ESP IS REAL!

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