14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has just announced that it’s planning on giving up on FTP support in Firefox browser, with version 90 to be the one removing the feature completely.
In the meantime, Mozilla plans to just disable FTP in the browser, and the upcoming Firefox 88, which is due to ship on April 19, will no longer allow FTP connections. At the same time, FTP support has also been disabled in the current beta and nightly builds of the browser.
Plans to remove FTP in Firefox were officially announced back in April 2020, and at that point, the team working on the browser explained that few people were still using it, so keeping this feature around made little sense.
“FTP is a protocol to transfer files from one host to another. It predates the Web and was not designed with security in mind. Now, we have decided to remove it because it is an infrequently used and insecure protocol. After FTP is disabled in Firefox, people can still use it to download resources if they really want to, but the protocol will be handled by whatever external application is supported on their platform,” Mozilla originally said.
Firefox 88 due next week
Mozilla also warned developers they should move away from FTP support in their extensions.
“With the deprecation, browserSettings.ftpProtocolEnabled will become read-only. Attempts to set this value will have no effect. Most places where an extension may pass “ftp” such as filters for proxy or webRequest should not result in an error, but the APIs will no longer handle requests of those types. To help offset this removal, ftp has been added to the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions. This means that extensions will be able to prompt users to launch a FTP application to handle certain links,” the company explains.
Firefox 88 is projected to launch next week for all supported platforms.