Firefox 88 Released With FTP Support Disabled, Support For JavaScript In PDFs

[uxmkt]

this is mistake and everyone will regret later

Well, you know how the saying goes... Those who don't understand the problems are doomed to reinvent the problems later on, and poorer/worse so.

[ehansin]

You are either intentionally misleading or clueless.

I am going to guess the former, or put another way - "sarcastic".

[acobar]

Firefox is just following a change Google made a while ago to Chrome and anything which just repackages Chromium's protocol support... which is something like 90% of users now. FTP was already dead.

I think I remember Google's rationale being that even Passive FTP is too much of a mess to bend over backward to support in a world with things like Carrier Grade NAT for IPv4... something I agree with as someone who's set up BSD-based firewalls in the past.

I think we should just stop holding back WebDAV server support to things like Apache when there's a WebDAV client in every major file manager and, to anything short of an MITMing proxy, TLS-protected WebDAV is indistinguishable from ordinary HTTPS because it's just HTTP with some new methods (new friends for GET, PUT, POST, etc.) for things like getting directory listings, file attributes, and revision histories, and clearly defined rules for how to achieve which modification using which verbs.

Do WebDAV clients support HTTP/2 yet? I remember hearing that has opportunistic encryption so you can use an HTTP URL and have the server upgrade to an encrypted but not authenticated connection without needing a CA cert to help make NSA-style large-scale passive surveillance unfeasible.

No one disputes that WebDAV is the way to go for new sites or those that already transitioned, the problem is that still today exist old sites with old stuff that uses FTP. For me, it is a bit of an annoyance to leave the browser to just access them but, if left with no other option, will fire filezilla.

What I find disheartening is the proposal to just use HTTP(S?), it just does not fit well and most sites that mimic ftp listing do it badly.

[jacob]

No one disputes that WebDAV is the way to go for new sites or those that already transitioned, the problem is that still today exist old sites with old stuff that uses FTP. For me, it is a bit of an annoyance to leave the browser to just access them but, if left with no other option, will fire filezilla.

What I find disheartening is the proposal to just use HTTP(S?), it just does not fit well and most sites that mimic ftp listing do it badly.

What issues do you see with HTTP(S)?

[garegin]

Not a network engineer, but doesn't HTTP have all the basic features that FTP has, making the later redundant. Please chime in.

[AnAccount]

Why they are removing support for FTP????

What's wrong with FTP????

The fact that Dropbox doesn't support FTP means that Dropbox should support it, not that we should drop it

You have never worked with ftp have you? FTP is not really a standard but a bunch of human readable responses, that you basically need and AI to reliably parse. Besides the responses you get, there are also a bunch of other issues making it really unfit for anything these days. Especially since there are other, better protocols available (like HTTP which supports file transfers just fine).
And from my understanding, they disabled it about a year ago, and you didn't notice. In fact, I didn't hear any complaints on the Internet. Can it be that nobody uses FTP in the browsers these days?
That you get upset over FTP removal just proves that you do not really know FTP.

[Slartifartblast]

this is mistake and everyone will regret later

Indeed, as Nat King Cole so mellifluously sang....."There may be trouble ahead"

[jabl]

No one disputes that WebDAV is the way to go for new sites or those that already transitioned, the problem is that still today exist old sites with old stuff that uses FTP. For me, it is a bit of an annoyance to leave the browser to just access them but, if left with no other option, will fire filezilla.

OTOH without Chrome and now Firefox forcing their hands, those old sites would never upgrade. Might be a bit of pain in the short term, but in the longer run the internet will be better off without decrepit junk like FTP.

[birdie]

this is mistake and everyone will regret later

This reply is a mistake and no one will regret this new feature more than they already regret running remote JS code in their web browser.

[birdie]

Not a network engineer, but doesn't HTTP have all the basic features that FTP has, making the later redundant. Please chime in.

FTP was built to manage files (list, send, edit, retrieve them) - HTTP was created to serve web pages and reply to GET/POST requests.

Two absolutely different protocols for absolutely different use cases. They only intersect at downloading and uploading individual files.