The world’s giving up on FTP support due to security reasons

Mar 19, 2020 09:22 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla is planning a series of changes in future versions of Firefox browser, including disabling FTP support by default.

A report from Ghacks reveals that the company is currently aiming to make the next big step in this regard with Firefox version 77 due in June when FTP support could be turned off by default.

Users will still be allowed to enable FTP manually, but this wouldn’t be recommended going forward.

At some point in the future, Mozilla intends to drop FTP support entirely, without allowing users to activate it from the flags screen anymore.

Google itself has also decided to step away from FTP support in Chrome due to security concerns, and according to discussion in this bug thread on Bugzilla, Mozilla is looking into following the same steps with Firefox too.

“FTP is an insecure protocol which Blink is considering removing. It seems like we're considering removing support for it on Android but perhaps we should go a step further and remove it completely?” a post published nearly seven months ago reads.

Google Chrome FTP support

Google explains that FTP support was deprecated not only because it was insecure, but also due to low usage.

“The current FTP implementation in 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,” Google said.

The search giant planned to remove FTP support completely in Google Chrome with the release of version 82 due in April – recently, Google announced that no new major releases for Chrome would ship as part of its efforts to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak and avoid putting the pressure on developers to deal with any compatibility issues that might arise.