Sorry. No. A web page links to a file, you activate the link, the link is valid, and the web browser... chokes? That is objectively a bug.
You need dedicated clients for plenty of protocols that can be in an href.
ftp is not a part of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is in HTTP. That is the “web” part of “web browser”. That they support other protocols is incidental.
FTP has nothing exceptional to it beyond it being a shitty, old protocol that is much more rarely used than BitTorrent.
- navigation (contains: bookmark, history, tab/window handling, etc)
- networking (contains: configuring proxies, credentials+cookies, traffic shapping, requests filtering/rewriting, caching+capture+replay)
- content display (html rendering + js sandboxes, userscripts and content filtering, pdf, multimedia, ..)
But even if it weren't, the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug.
I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages".
The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.
It's none of my business what parts of the web you frequent. But I'm only a hobbyist and I see FTP links all the time. Most recently while looking for older character set information for a homegrown libiconv-type project.
Firefox 90 removed functionality that has been a part of the standard experience for a quarter-century and is still in widespread use. It is a bug.
I can ask you the opposite question... I do mostly think it's sad that they're dropping FTP support, but if it's expensive for them to maintain it for the little percentage of users (I'm guessing, maybe this is an incorrect approximation) who use it...
Btw I'm just telling you my experience, please don't be rude, it's hard to find allies that way.
I would agree it's probably a small percentage of users who use it, but I don't think that's a good reason to drop support. If software only kept features used by a substantial number of users, SharePoint wouldn't allow exporting lists to Access databases, Excel wouldn't allow pivot tables, and so on. I think there's a cliché about how 80% of Word users only use 20% of its features... but it's a different 20% for everyone. As a result, adopting such a principle would lead to truly disheartening results. Will Firefox perhaps completely drop support for PIV tokens next?
I am not familiar with Firefox's architecture, I've only compiled it from source 2-3 times and only one of those times was setting up my own build environment (as opposed to a compiling package system). I've never hacked on it to any degree beyond the most trivial. So I could very well be wrong... but... I suspect it has not been very expensive to maintain, given that the protocol is simple and I believe has not changed in many years.
The last sentence reads to me like "Are you for freaking real right now?!", incredulity mixed with anger.
The Chrome team published some good information about exactly how widely FTP is used: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JUra5HnsbR_xmtQctkb2iVxR... (see heading: Usage information)
Removing insecure protocols is a good thing, especially one that is commonly used to download software of all things. If you're one of the ~0.03% (as of late 2020) that relies on downloading files through FTP for whatever reason, there's nothing stopping you from downloading a more specialized client.
I truly don't understand what your problem here is: if you install an FTP client and it registers itself as a handler for ftp links with your OS, the process of downloading a file via FTP when you click on an FTP link should be pretty seamless.