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Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by metalliqaz on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @04:22PM (#24781129)
"The current FTP implementation in Google Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms."

Says it all right there

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by tannhaeuser on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:03PM (#24781572)
> Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client

Investing into much more complex browser extensions such as eg QUIC has necessarily even lower usage. Basically, this rationale for removing FTP support is made up/self-delusional when the reality is that Chrome devs want to drop "legacy" features to focus on others.

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by perardi on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @05:40PM (#24781960)
That’s a powerful set of scare quotes around “legacy”. FTP, by any reasonable definition, is legacy, and if you need FTP, you have FileZilla, or the terminal.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by Spivak on Thursday October 15, 2020 @12:22AM (#24784907)
FTP is legacy in the sense that it hasn’t hasn’t had the masses giving it love but it’s not dead by any stretch.

ProFTPD, pure-ftpd, and vsftpd are all active projects that are shipped with every major Linux distro. It has first class support on Windows through IIS. Every platform has native clients for it.

FTP is guilty of not being cool anymore but letting it die completely seems like such a waste. FTP could be the already widely-supported solution to the send a file between two devices problem that has a million bespoke solutions. Oh well.

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by viraptor on Thursday October 15, 2020 @01:23AM (#24785182)
> FTP could be the already widely-supported solution to the send a file between two devices problem

It really couldn't. It has no discovery, no active identity validation story, issues with NAT traversal, relies on filesystem abstraction, ... In sending a file between two devices the actual file sending is the most trivial part and the only part that FTP can do (in the old and clunky let's-split-control-and-data way). We deserve better.

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by Spivak on Thursday October 15, 2020 @11:30AM (#24789631)
HTTP also relies on a the filesystem abstraction, it doesn't stop web servers from presenting virtual versions.

The advantage that FTP has is ubiquitous and broad device support. FTP can provide the transport and authentication for a huge variety of devices and provide an instant user story of how to connect with older devices. Discovery and NAT traversal are external to the transport protocol anyway and would be just supporting _ftp._tcp records and the normal TURN/STUN servers.

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by viraptor on Thursday October 15, 2020 @03:49PM (#24792983)
HTTP does not use filesystem abstraction. The path in HTTP requests is completely unrelated to files and just looks like a file path.

FTP has actual stateful filesystem traversal commands. PWD / CWD / CDUP / ... . Of course it can be faked, but why bother?

I understood devices in the comment as personal devices for end users rather than servers. In that case discovery is really not external. Same with NAT - it's a difference between "kind of works sometimes" and "is designed to work with it". See Skype's initial success. Or how SIP documents NAT behaviour extensively https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6314

Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by perardi on Thursday October 15, 2020 @11:23AM (#24789530)
Uh-huh. So, uh, use those clients? Chrome will presumably even send ftp:// links to those clients.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by matthewmacleod on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @06:38PM (#24782537)
I guarantee more people use QUIC daily than use FTP.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by anonymousiam on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @07:06PM (#24782765)
FTP is 40 years old. I wonder if the same thing could be said about QUIC and FTP 40 years from now...
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by yuliyp on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @08:04PM (#24783231)
And 40 years from now we might be removing QUIC support from whatever we have in place of web browsers.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by anonymousiam on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @08:11PM (#24783289)
Yes, but in that probable future, FTP will still exist somewhere.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by userbinator on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @08:16PM (#24783328)
...because of Google's own efforts in pushing QUIC.
Re:Deprecate FTP support (deprecated) by pmarin on Thursday October 15, 2020 @06:35AM (#24786988)
tl;dr they can not put AdSense in a FTP server.