Its not just Chrome, Firefox is planning to deprecate it as well (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/chrome-and-fire...). Relevant Bugzilla ticket (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85464)

Whaaat? They came for the RSS feeds and I said nothing...

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."

Not Surprising given Mozilla Stance to duplicate and support everything Google does in a effort to chase relevancy again

Mozilla has lost the ability to be an independent protector of the Open Web

It's sad because they don't need to. Quantum is great, and you can remap your keybinds and use MaterialFox to get (almost) the exact same experience. Of course your average pleb won't go through this effort, but people need to know how good Firefox has gotten.

And to the people who disagree: Firefox has always been great, but it often came with a lot of bugs and inconveniences. It didn't use to be as accessible.

https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox

> Quantum is great, and you can remap your keybinds

Please explain how. Since firefox 57 (quantum), there's precisely no way to do that properly...

Have they fixed the issue with excessive resource consumption when using Firefox on a Retina MacBook?

+1

I tried to switch to FF on multiple occasions, but it's a CPU hog on MacBook. Why is this issue ignored for so long?

"Resource consumption" in the parent comment refers to power efficiency, specifically GPU blits. That issue has not been ignored. I don't know what "CPU hog" refers to; the issue is not about CPU usage.

It's consuming ~20% CPU in idle on my machine (MacBook Pro Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015, 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, macOS Mojave 10.14.6)

Based on what I saw the last time I checked Mozilla's bug tracker, the issue has a low priority and no one is actively working to resolve it.

From what I understand, it's a low level rendering issue.

That's not true. There was a roadmap posted yesterday and patches to begin to address the issue landed this week, including a new preference to opt into Core Animation. This is Markus' top priority at present. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

Source: I wrote the initial version of those patches, though I think Markus has basically rewritten them all at this point.

My mistake, I hadn't checked on the status in nearly a year. Glad to hear that progress is being made. Thanks for the update and patches!

By following Chrome every time Google wants to removes access to parts of the web not sufficiently encrypted (to thwart ISP competition for ads and data) or not serving ads (like FTP) Firefox is working to keep Chrome relevant.

It has been going on for years.

Nah. Average consumers almost never touch ftp anymore. I'm a tech pro and even I haven't used ftp in years. Having ftp servers accessible from a browser is a fairly useless luxury at this point. Dedicated ftp clients are very easy to come by for anyone.

I'm a tech pro too and I need it to pull down large FCC and census datasets, but I'm not too concerned about it being removed from the browser. Anyone who still is utilizing FTP is probably savvy enough to install a better tool that's feature-rich like Filezilla.

Do dedicated ftp clients include crawling and indexing?

Neither does the browser. The search engine does that. What should happen here is the search engine still crawls and indexes resources accessible by ftp, and the ftp:// url gets passed to the operating system to launch an appropriate native program. This happens for protocols like magnet:// and discord:// .

Whether Google's search engine will continue to do so for ftp:// resources once Google's web browser no longer handles them remains to be seen.

Worth noting here, if you open an FTP url in Safari on Mac, it will open the Finder and connect to the server there.

Since we’re talking about utilities built into the OS, I’ve never had a problem with this.

Yeah, they won't, which is the point. Magnet links are not in Google results either. So having the browser support the protocol is pretty important in this case.

I don't think I've ever come across a web search that led directly back to a ftp site. How much do they actually currently index ftp anyway?

> I'm a tech pro and even I haven't used ftp in years.

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.

Time to bust out FileZilla again!

> There are 100,000s of resources [...] major blow for information storage

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.

> Do you have a search that shows ftp: urls?

Sure, searching for "rfc 1337 inurl:ftp" returns FTP urls for the top four results for me.

Thanks

I wonder if any FTP was spoken by the spider to discover those resources, or whether those are just opaque FTP links discovered embedded in HTTP resources, that were not crawled further.

They're crawled, and the full content is indexed. (You can see a text snippet, and some of the results aren't actually RFC 1337 but other RFCs referring to it).

Yes, google has a cache of some FTP links, as found by GPs query.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TaTfcCq...

True. They're very much the new Microsoft and Chrome is the new IE. But the general public also doesn't know what it used to be like. I logged in just to up vote you. I wish we had functioning anti-trust laws.

the US govt has google on points one and two currently. this has been building since the last round of FTC comments: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GK8YUqQUHYqfmulKuDUwhYG2_GS... although many including google are evading. they dont care for some reason: https://cicilline.house.gov/press-release/cicilline-criticiz...

> 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.

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.

You're mixing up file types and protocols. No, my OS won't open ftp links for me.

> mixing up file types and protocols

"relevant model"

> my OS won't open ftp links for me.

What OS? Because I bet you it does.

It reminds me of when they bought the deja archive and wrecked usenet, mixing it up with google groups