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!