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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Why is FTP all of a sudden an important interop protocol when we have HTTP, HTTPS, rsync, scp, etc? Why is the browser responsible for maintaining this legacy FTP support when there are command-line utilities and dedicated GUI clients for it?

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The issue isn't that FTP is all of a sudden an important protocol. It has been chugging away in the background without much fanfare for decades. The issue with Firefox removing it largely comes down to convenience: it's been included in browsers for so long that it's now the primary means (in some industries) for non-technical users to access files.

This whole ordeal kind of reminds me of IE8. Whether good or bad, companies stuck to what they knew and what tools they used to carry out their day-to-day. I can easily see updates being avoided to keep FTP functionality at the expense of newer security issues being patched.

Is it really the responsibility of Firefox to maintain FTP support when everyone else has dropped it, just so that a tiny fraction people don't have to learn a new tool and/or modernize infrastructure that's out of date?

I wouldn't say they're responsible for maintaining it. But I think it's fair to question their decisions. As I mentioned above, one of their principles specifically calls out that the internet depends on interoperability and various protocols.

I don't really understand the argument that if everyone else drops support that Firefox should too. Firefox could champion themselves as continuing to support various protocols and live the principles they set out for themselves.

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