Advertisement

Firefox Drops FTP Support

Mozilla is about to discontinue FTP support in Firefox. The company is going to disable it out of the box in version 77, which is coming on June 2, 2020.

Starting in Firefox 77, the FTP feature will be disabled, but the user will be able to re-enable it with the network.ftp.enabled option in about:config. This won't affect ESR releases, where FTP will remain available at least till version 78.

In 2021, Mozilla is planning to remove all the FTP code from the browser.

Mozilla names the following reasons:

  • The FTP protocol is outdated.
  • The FTP code is also outdated and hard to maintain in modern browser versions.
  • FTP is insecure against MITM attacks.

As you may recall, Firefox 61 and above doesn't load web page resources, e.g. images, linked via FTP. Starting with Firefox 70, the browser doesn't render file contents for files you browse over the FTP.

Similarly, Chrome 80 has the FTP feature disabled for a select group of users, that will be followed by the complete FTP code removal in Chrome 82.

According to Google's stats, only 0.1% of Chrome users use FTP.

Mozilla suggests using external apps for FTP tasks. Personally, I can recommend the FileZilla project for both FTP client and FTP server solutions.

Support us

Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:

If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support!

Advertisеment

Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

6 thoughts on “Firefox Drops FTP Support”

  1. From this blog:
    blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/04/13/what-to-expect-for-the-upcoming-deprecation-of-ftp-in-firefox/

    “FTP was disabled on the Firefox Nightly pre-release channel on April 9. To mitigate the risk of potentially causing breakages during the COVID-19 pandemic, FTP will not be disabled from the Firefox release channel until at least July 2020. If the pandemic situation has not improved by July 28 (the expected release date for Firefox 79), there may be further delays.”

    also I can still use FTP sites in Firefox stable release 77 as Mozilla did not really disable it due to the pandemic

      1. so do I – I have FileZilla installed on a few of my PCs

        and

        looks like the deprecation of FTP support in Firefox has been postponed until sometime in year 2021 as I can STILL access some FTP sites with a recent Firefox 82 beta build that I was beta testing.

        ALSO according to this Chrome Status page updated 8/1/2020:
        http://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6246151319715840
        Google will remove FTP support completely starting with the Chromium v88 builds

  2. Some say this is due to FTP being unsecure, some say this is due to low usage.
    Pls enlighten me, what could be caused in Firefox by FTP being unsecure?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

css.php
Using Telegram? Subscribe to the blog channel!
Hello. Add your message here.