Firefox will no longer support the FTP protocol

After the Chrome browser dropped support for the FTP protocol in Chrome 88 in January this year, the Firefox browser also announced that it would remove the FTP protocol support in Firefox 90.

The File Transfer Protocol is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data connections between the client and the server. FTP has always been the most important and most important Internet tool due to its unique advantages for nearly half a century. Its goal is to improve file sharing and provide a method for indirect use of remote computers and transparent, reliable, and efficient data transfer to users. However, FTP has a very high latency, which means that the time from the start of the request to the first receipt of the required data will be very long; and from time to time, some lengthy login processes must be performed.

Google said earlier that this is an unencrypted protocol, and the number of users is gradually decreasing. Caitlin Neiman, Mozilla plug-in community manager, said that removing FTP support will not have a major impact on users. “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.”

It is reported that the built-in FTP implementation of Firefox has been disabled in the Firefox Nightly and Beta versions, and will be disabled in the Firefox 88 version on April 19 this year. In Firefox 90, this implementation will be completely removed. When FTP is disabled in Firefox, the browser will delegate ftp:// links to external applications in the same way as other protocol handlers.