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Firefox 90+ dropping support for ftp

Chuck(G)

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As I discovered

The problem is, of course, is that there's still a lot of vintage content on the web in ftp form. I'd assumed that there would be some enterprising soul would have written a plugin, but no soap.
Yes, if I want a GUI interface, I can use FileZilla or Krusader or any of several other packages. But when you have an ftp that's got both binary, text and HTML files, it gets to be a onerous job browsing through a large repository.

I understand that PaleMoon still supports this, as well as Firefox ESR. Maybe I'll go there.

Still strikes me as the Mozilla folks are getting pretty high-handed in all of this. :(
 
A lot of old ftp stuff remains around. Rather than promote it to a new platform, it will simply be dropped.

For example

Now, this may not matter to the gamers and script kiddies who have never held a tape in their hands--but for we folks sitting on old gear, it's essential. Has there ever been an archive.org-type project to capture ftp content?

It also should be remembered that early Web content was obtained via ftp.

FWIW, telling Firefox to use Palemoon to open ftp content works well.
 
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NAPALM FTP Indexer, Mamont, FileSearching, and even (although slow) Archie are still around, but a few other good ones such as FileWatcher, FileMare, and globalfilesearch.com/ftplike.club have shut down in the past few years. Sucks to lose any of them, because one may have indexed the only remaining source of a particular file in the wild (or a better copy of a file, e.g. with the original or closer-to-original modification date) that the others missed. Of course the FTP servers themselves that remain have also been diminishing over time, and anti-"legacy" Big Tech shenanigans and F.U.D. like this (claimed to be for the sake of "security", as usual) are only going to promote these losses.

The Wayback Machine sadly doesn't archive FTP sites to my knowledge (save some instances where a server also allowed HTTP/HTTPS access), but there are a couple of collections on the main Internet Archive site, "The FTP Site Boneyard" and "Archive Team: The FTP Site Download", where people have uploaded their own mirrors of hundreds of FTP sites.
 
This step was long over-due. I'm not a fan of programs trying to do all. A web browser is for browsing the web using http. That's it. We always had ftp clients for connecting to ftp servers. I think MS IE was the first that did integrade ftp into the browser and everyone (of course) copied that.
 
I can run MS Office in my web browser but accessing FTP is too much? :rolleyes:
 
This step was long over-due. I'm not a fan of programs trying to do all. A web browser is for browsing the web using http. That's it. We always had ftp clients for connecting to ftp servers. I think MS IE was the first that did integrade ftp into the browser and everyone (of course) copied that.

In the very early days of the Web, HTML content was usually fetched via ftp. So there's a close association with HTML.
What makes a browser convenient is the example I cited: HTML on an ftp site referencing other HTML pages. Difficult and damned inconvenient to navigate with an ftp-only fetch program. There is logic to this.

I note that some ftp content is archived on archive.org, for example, ftp.fic.com.tw (think FIC motherboards), but it's all in a big tar archive and very difficult to browse.
 
I can run MS Office in my web browser but accessing FTP is too much? :rolleyes:

Tell that to someone making three times your salary and 1/3 the brain cells.
The mantra is that if it's old it has to be replaced with something better, else you run into fearmongering of the COBOL scenario.
 
I stopped upgrading Firefox when they were going to remove FTP, although I don't know how long before I'm forced to, ahem, upgrade. In my opinion, a browser should work with every possible protocol, not just http(s), no matter how old (or new). If some enterprising person or organisation was to make a decent all-protocol browser, I'd switch to it straight away.
 
I'll again recommend Pale Moon, which is a Firefox fork without the idiotic v4+ UI changes, with FTP support, and a little less memory-leaky to boot.
 
Funny thing, the other day I reviewed a copy of Norton Navigator for Windows 95 - it has an enhanced file manager that in one pane shows a list of drives... and an "FTP" icon. It reminds me of how Windows 10 displays a list of drives followed by Microsoft's "OneDrive" crap.

And there, I think is part of the answer. The big companies don't want unfettered personal file sharing. They want everything to go through their own paid services.
 
This step was long over-due. I'm not a fan of programs trying to do all. A web browser is for browsing the web using http. That's it. We always had ftp clients for connecting to ftp servers. I think MS IE was the first that did integrade ftp into the browser and everyone (of course) copied that.

With that mindset Web Browsers should not be used for streaming or video at all. HTML is not the only thing a webbrowser does. Yes there should be limits.. but FTP just for file and pdf retrieval is a must. Yes I know 99% of people might not use it, but if we all followed what those 99% of people do, there wouldnt be soap,. We'd all be picking our @sses all day long watching the fast and the furious part X99.
 
Funny thing, the other day I reviewed a copy of Norton Navigator for Windows 95 - it has an enhanced file manager that in one pane shows a list of drives... and an "FTP" icon. It reminds me of how Windows 10 displays a list of drives followed by Microsoft's "OneDrive" crap.

And there, I think is part of the answer. The big companies don't want unfettered personal file sharing. They want everything to go through their own paid services.

I refuse to use OneDrive. And uninstall it as soon as I am able.
 
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