Also, I can't be the only one who's absolutely sick of hearing that bloody "security" argument again. Yes, everyone knows FTP is plaintext, and so is HTTP. But drivers, which I'd say are a significant part of FTP use, are almost always themselves signed anyway, and I don't think malware is widely distributed via FTP either (I'm curious why FTPS/SFTP doesn't see to be indexed, or why they didn't decide to add that to the browser instead --- or at least I've never come across a search result that links to one.)
Maybe it's time to bring ftp search engines back.
And yes I know there's some niche support still, just as FTP will live on.
You mean no one knows that FTP is plaintext except a minority of users which happens to be on HN.
Google is optimizing its browser for the majority, chrome is not a power-user browser. Maybe they'll add an option to enable ftp or something.
> drivers, which I'd say are a significant part of FTP use
I'm not sure how that's true. Every time I used FTP, it was not for drivers. All the drivers I downloaded were over http(s), from constructor websites.
That is a problem. We have browser engine duopoly, and really everyone is doing whatever Google wants anyway. So as they're optimizing against power users, they're making the whole web much worse.
Yet they are positioning it as the only browser
Well, I think there is enough people like us, where a proper 'power-user' browser is worth maintaining. Any takers?
I guess not. More likely there'll be plugin to add this functionality back.
The point of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is to do precisely that: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful -- long tails included. But I guess for them it's not...
(Also, I can't believe the Chrome team is so strapped it can't afford to support or harden the feature, as some in the bug tracker suggest [1]. This is Google we are talking about, not some tiny open source project!)
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=333943
How do you display ads while someone is accessing an FTP server?
ftp://example.com/directory/file.extension can be a link in a website, where the website displays ads.
I'm just imagining some people having a conversation that goes something like this:
"The funding for this feature has been removed because we can't serve ads on a page like this https://imgur.com/20ooI9f "
Edit: grammar
I believe those will happen, in the long run.
The next HTTP spec includes mandatory SSL, and Google had a hand in designing QUIC, and Google has been deprecating traditional SMTP authorisation.
But my gut reaction to reading this concern is actually: why do you think this is “bullying” and not “opening the door for a niche competitor”?
Bully them back. Don't use Google search and don't use Chrome.
It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if their own browser can't connect to them.
(I don't understand why they can't just keep FTP support in, but with a security dialog that warns users the connection and data will be non-encrypted)
So much is going to be lost when this happens, it's really sad. All because Google want to recreate the internet as the Googlenet, with HTTPS URLs only, most of which link to their own walled garden servers (AMP etc.)
The internet started off as a wonderful limitless information sharing platform, now it's just a shopping mall controlled by corporates. The worse thing is... the general public just don't care.
Bugzilla.mozilla.org is offline, here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190520010425/http://bugzilla.m...
and relevant quotes posted there (a year ago!): "I think we should mark this bug as WONTFIX. We have a vague plans of deprecating FTP completely in Firefox, there is no point in adding more code in this area." "Since we (sooner or later) would like to deprecate FTP completely, we should not add more code in that area to our codebase."
Mozilla has lost the ability to be an independent protector of the Open Web
That's why you haven't. Ask regular non-tech people doing office jobs in non-tech companies. Some FTP use will show up. Random example I've seen recently: a sports clothing vendor giving seasonal copy bundles for marketing posters to its partners via a password-protected FTP server.
Thats a very small fraction of all the resources.
> It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if their own browser can't connect to them.
This is a worthy concern, for sure. Although how do you know they haven't already done this? Do you have a search that shows ftp: urls?
> The internet started off as a wonderful limitless information sharing platform, now it's just a shopping mall controlled by corporates.
I'm trying to think of the period when the internet wasn't driven by corporate interests. Before the dot com boom, I suppose? When newsgroups thrived, and email servers roamed free without spam? That was fun but theres a fuckton more information on the internet now.
Sure, searching for "rfc 1337 inurl:ftp" returns FTP urls for the top four results for me.
Why would it? Seems like the relevant model is file types the browser can't open, and there are lots of search results for those?
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en
Lots of worry in this thread from people who apparently don't use ftp enough to know that your OS will already open ftp links for you.
It's also a shame that the actual technical discussions are like half a page down.
I'm of the mindset that code written 20 years ago should run today. This is a breaking change on a critical piece of internet infrastructure. Google, by nature of operating the most popular web browser, has a moral obligation to the community to provide a stable environment.
There are something like 10^9 webpages out there. How many of these will become less accessible because of this change? Many well maintained webpages will have to expend resources to migrate off ftp. Less maintained webpages with FTP links will not be updated and put the burden of installing an FTP client on the user, reducing accessibility.
This is Google externalizing the cost of updating their software by forcing everyone else to update their webpages to following Google's specification.
I'm of the mindset that it should be possible to rub code written 20 years ago, but not always the same way you run code written more recently. Emulation, virtual machines etc all allow access to old work without hobbling future development with backwards compatibility concerns (see: Windows).
In this case, there are plenty of free and open source options for FTP clients. No one is going to have the world closed off to them as a result of this.
Given that chrome didn't exist 20 years ago, this seems like a fairly absurd position to apply to this situation. No code from 20 years ago relies on chrome having ftp support.
I believe otherwise. Let the old die, so we can alleviate ourselves to create something more suitable to our times.
We should stop telling others what they SHOULD do. (Crap I just did.) Anyways, why not contact Google and offer them to pay the costs of maintaining every piece of software they ever decide to deprecate? Or just go on and build a better browser if you can.
So you would have cp/m, MS-DOS, PDP-11 RSX-11M, Coherent, Vax VMS, old broken compilers for dead languages, IBM 360 TOS (yes, tape operating system), IBM 360 DOS, Sigma 5 Real-Time-Batch monitor, autocoder, 1401 software, Palm OS?
But for the love of all that is Balloons and Seashells, why?
More to the point--did Chrome have FTP 20 years ago? No, it did not.
In my opinion, they should have never put it there in the first place.
Really, though? Are there any examples of any web pages that are strictly available from FTP instead of HTTP? If so, why? Isn’t HTTP made specifically for the purpose of transporting hypertext? Why use another, more general protocol when you can use the one made specifically for your use case?
I’m sure there’s good stuff on FTP still. I really, really doubt people are throwing SPAs and PWAs on FTP servers though.
It's OK if some of the more antiquated parts of the web die off. I don't want to have to support old Flash loading screens, I don't need AOL instant messenger status badges, or iFramed in MySpace comments, and I don't need to open FTP in my browser. Most users these days wouldn't even know how to use this via browser... ftp://myname:mypassword@123.123.123.123... it's just a relic.
Anyone who wants to use FTP knows how to download a program for it. We don't need it in Chrome.
> It's not part of the modern web, so it's just another loose end to tie up.
While I see that it is shared by many here, I do not get this sentiment. It's still out there and rarely used, yes. But similarly would not require much maintenance for the time being, remove it when users decide it's dead, not just your shiny modern partners. The codebase cannot be that burdened by support for the protocol, why even take action?
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is the reason why this even came up, is that to soothe some weird code base / maintenance metric?
Rather, there are no ads on FTP pages, so Google is going to use it's power to stop countless people to stop using FTP.
When I click magnet:// links, my bittorrent client opens. When I click slack:// links, my slack client opens. With this change, when I click ftp:// my ftp client will open. Chrome has simply decided it only wants to spend resources focusing on http:// and make the unrelated protocols separate. I see 0 problem with this, it's not like they're killing the only or even the most popular ftp client out there. We should all be using sftp anyways...
That said, I find the viewpoint "users should not be impacted by this deprecation" the height of arrogance. Note that phrase is lifted from the article, and is not present in the dev team's post.
FTP isn't used much anymore, but IMO/IME, it's still nice to have for those rare times when you come across a file that you need to download and it's served over FTP.
No one should be running FTP in 2019. It sends passwords in plain text for christ's sake.
So...no reason for FTP in the browser, since it already supports HTTP?
That said, I agree that its outmoded today.
The idea that young people know more about tech than their parents will become less and less true in the future.
Before, computers compelled you to have a certain level of technical competence to be a user.
Now, the barrier to entry is a lot lower, but there aren't many of the very young learning their way around command lines, etc. The resources once you are on the track to doing technical stuff are far better, but you're less likely to end up on that track-- especially at an early age.
What’s the benefit in keeping protocols for the sake of it?
Do we need browser support for it? It still happens now and then that a link will have an ftp target. That could be handled in the browser or it could open a separate url-handling application, as e.g. email or magnet urls do.
That's fine... Except on a Chromebook or Android, where it will be a pain.
Aren't you forgetting that IE is a web browser, so are you suggesting it should just offload ftp:// links to another browser?
Also, IE is deprecated and replaced by Edge which is now essentially Chrome, so eventually won't work there as well.
Like, worst-case ChromeOS loses ftp?
If suddenly the links stop working and there isn't a way view the contents, it will be a frustrating transition
You'll still be able to download an ftp: link by your browser opening your local FTP client, same as a magnet: opening your local torrenting client -- as it should be.
And honestly, if you're one of the few people who actually need to regularly download files with FTP, don't you want a better standalone client anyways?
(I also invented a httpdirlist format (I have been told that httpdirlist is like WebDAV but not as bad; but I don't know WebDAV so I cannot say if it is or not). But, sometimes, the other protocols is better than HTTP(S) anyways.)
I think it is fine to have them implemented in separate programs, although sometimes you might want to display the result in the browser; one possibility is that the user can configure a program to execute and can configure it to treat the data that program writes to stdout as a HTTP response (possibly with different permissions than normal; it might allow some things that are normally disallowed, and some things that are normally allowed might not work). You might then also want to support other MIME types. You can do this also with external programs; so one configuration option could be to allow treating the program as a filter to convert it into a format the browser understands (e.g. plain text, HTML, PNG, etc; perhaps farbfeld should be supported too, even only for the purpose of these external filters).
Anyway, it's not like Chrome couldn't send the URL to a dedicated FTP client. Hell, it could even be another browser like Firefox. It's not going to be the end of the world -- just not as seamless of an experience and one would like.
The web is not just HTTP. FTP has been the binary companion to the text-based HTTP protocol, and I think that for the sake of the browser being a platform and not just a viewing tool, it should stay.
End of an era. I imagine it would take the better part of a decade to earn my loyalty back if they ever pulled a 180, but seeing their direction the writing has been on the wall for a while.
Mozilla stopped running ftp://ftp.mozilla.org quite a while ago. Maybe that is what you were remembering?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sftp-client/jajcol...
Not sure if it uses a proprietary proxy though.
https://www.fxsitecompat.dev/en-CA/docs/2018/loading-ftp-res... But FTP still is.
I feel like Google is quickly moving in the footsteps of IE; embrace, extend, extinguish and all that. I don't like how Google now has so much market share in the browser space that they can essentially unilaterally make decisions that are user-unfriendly and have a real impact. I switched (back) to Firefox for this reason. I switched away from them when they essentially purged Brendan Eich for political reasons, but they're the lesser of two evils now.
I guess in summary, all browsers suck and we're all fucked.
Why should we keep FTP or other legacy non-HTTP protocols around? What are we buying? Slightly lower connection setup byte counts?
For remote file management and uploading there are other options besides WebDAV (itself a HTTP protocol extension), such as SSH/SFTP.
Basically the only case I can think of that needs FTP are people wanting to access a shared-webhost web-space. And FTP works fine for them already, and they aren’t using Chrome to update their site either - so no loss.
