>I just don't see many use cases for FTP anymore
I'm seeing this a lot today. It's almost like people have forgotten what FTP stands for.
The use case is transferring files.
>Why would you choose FTP at this point over HTTP(S), SFTP, BitTorrent, etc.?
Because I don't have a client for any of the others installed
Re:Stopping FTP support in Firefox 90
by da_chicken on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @11:32PM
(#27902052)
> The use case is transferring files.
Yes, and it's not particularly unique or well suited to that task over any other protocol.
> Because I don't have a client for any of the others installed
Then I guess you can use telnet for FTP as well as web browsing.
> Yes, and it's not particularly unique or well suited to that task over any other protocol.
When the files are on an FTP server it is. And given that there are more than a million anonymous FTP servers on the internet today, there are a lot of files that are on FTP servers.
I mean, it's opposed by the argument that it used to be popular. It's a pretty low bar.
FTP is a protocol that dates to when NCP was the protocol suite that ran the Internet. It was retrofitted to TCP/IP. That's why there's a command session and a data session. The protocol is so old that it dates to a time when IP+port was the unique identifier for a half-duplex connection. Nobody even uses active FTP anymore because everyone has firewalls now.
It's not like web browsers have added SFTP support. They haven't even added FTPS support (either flavor) as far as I'm aware. I just don't see many use cases for FTP anymore. Why would you choose FTP at this point over HTTP(S), SFTP, BitTorrent, etc.?
The last system I used that required FTP actually used implicit FTPS. Worse, when the vendor implemented SFTP to replace FTPS like their customers had been demanding, they actually implemented Simple File Transfer Protocol (i.e., RFC 913) and not SSH File Transfer Protocol. I wish I were joking.