Mozilla will remove support for FTP protocol in Firefox

by ·

Mozilla announced that support for the FTP protocol will be removed from Firefox. After that, users will not be able to download files via the FTP protocol, nor will they be able to view the contents of FTP links or folders in the Firefox browser.

The discussion of ending FTP support dates back to 2015 when Google and Mozilla engineers started discussing how to remove FTP from Chrome and Firefox browsers. Last August, Google began removing FTP support in Chrome, removing the ability to access and view FTP links from a browser. Google originally planned to disable FTP by default in Chrome 81, and completely removed the FTP code when Chrome 82 was released, but now these release plans have been delayed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

In fact, Mozilla added an option to disable FTP support in Firefox in 2018, but this flag was never enabled by default. The default disablement of the FTP protocol will begin in Firefox 77, this version is expected to be released in June this year. At that time, users will still be able to view and download files via FTP, but must manually re-enable FTP support in the preferences on the about: config page.

By 2021, Mozilla will eventually delete all FTP protocol code inside Firefox, and there will no longer be a solution to re-enable FTP support, and Firefox will stop processing FTP content completely.

Before FTP was completely removed, Firefox users could control FTP support in the following ways:

  1. Load about:config in the browser’s address bar.
  2. Confirm that you will be careful.
  3. Search for network.ftp.enabled.
    1. Set the preference to TRUE to enable FTP support in Firefox.
    2. Set the preference to FALSE to disable FTP support in Firefox.

Via: ghacks

Tags: