Average people use what comes preinstalled. They might not be allowed to install software. Users get stranded on old versions that have to be supported. Install base, “it just works,” and lowest common denominator is crucial if you are working with anyone outside your household or organization. Internet downloads made software distribution much cheaper. App stores fixed the “first Google result is malware” problem. But people will still install an app at much lower rates than clicking something that loads in the browser.
FTP as a whole should be replaced but the average person doesn’t have an easy SFTP client installed.
What percentage of the "general population" do you think has ever used FTP. Even once in their entire life. I'd wager it is less than 1/10,000 users. If we look for people who use FTP at least once month, I'd wager it is less than 1/10,000,000. Where are these users that need FTP but would get stranded because they can only install a browser?
Like doing some research for a school project, googling, getting a link to a pdf document on some ftp, clicking the link. Or clicking the download link on some website, and the file is downloaded using ftp.
These things used to be very common, but are less common now.
I think you are overestimating this. I'd include that in my 1/10,000 number.
Access to a feature is a feature. I have not had to change a tire in over a decade, but my unused spare tire in my car's trunk is actually being used every time I drive, by being available.
What about nearly any accessibility feature? What about fire extinguishers? I know that support for the FTP protocol is not nearly as severe, but it is on the same spectrum. For the minority of users that use it the minority of the time, it is good to have it available.
As long as it does not impose significant costs to keep ftp support, they should keep it.
And as it happens, I have had to use FTP several times recently, because there are still active FTP links in some manuscripts and scholarly articles I've read.
But it does. This is explained in the docs. The existing FTP support is bad and updating it to make it secure is a ton of work.
Fire Extinguishers and Spare Tires are safety features. When they are needed, they become absolutely critical. It is also very difficult to predict when they will be needed because they are the result of errors rather than intentional behavior.
In-browser FTP is nothing like that.
Most probably didn't realize that they were using FTP, which is the point of having it integrated into the browser.
Okay. You are one of the 1/10,000,000. What percentage of people have downloaded a driver through any means other than "plugged in device, it said "install driver" and the user clicked it"?
If you're at the user level where you need FTP, then downloading an application is not an unreasonable request.
> Internet downloads made software distribution much cheaper.
This seems orthogonal to supporting FTP in a browser.
There have been a long time since I saw any FTP link in a page that random people are expected to visit. I'm not sure anybody will miss this functionality.
About people that can't install software, those are probably behind a firewall that prohibits FTP too.
But anyway, browsers are paranoid about never breaking anything, so this is surprising.
That being said as long as Chrome will launch an FTP client upon encountering ftp:// links, it's not a problem.
In the nineties i was in the bussiness of dial-up internet providers here in Brazil and remember how handy was Opera back then.
For instance, it was a great dial up manager back then, and it made the effort of installing dial up clients on Windows machines very easy.
Long time ago there was no JavaScript and later it was still possible to browse Internet with JS disabled.
JavaScript is something that clients and content producers wanted, but is only necessary to realistically use web because content producers decide their content should not be accessible without JavaScript running in the browser.
I, personally, still use browser to access FTP resources because I only use them read only and because it is convenient to browse them the same way as similar resources but using HTTP.
Ftp support, beloved as I think it is, was also never a requirement for being called a web browser. Nor gopher, even though some web browsers also supported them.
I believe the only requirements for being called a web browser are: 1) support for HTTP (in at least one of its various forms), 2) being able to render HTML (in at least one of its various forms, including XHTML) as something more presentable than raw text, and 3) an interface component letting the user follow at least some hyperlinks.
However, I think bastawhiz's argument is a bit dubious. Many people use "internet browser" as a synonym for "web browser", and indeed a DDG search for that phrase just now shows advertisements for Chrome and Opera. I also see that Sony offers an "Internet Browser" for their TVs which is a version of Opera. https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00014209
So had things been just a bit different, we could have been calling these things "internet browsers" instead of "web browsers". (Rather like when places offer "Internet access" only to find all non-http(s) ports are blocked.)