Mozilla announced that Firefox will remove the support for the FTP protocol. After that, the user will not be able to download files via FTP protocol can not view the contents of a folder or FTP link in the Firefox browser.
Michal Novotny from Mozilla software engineer, said the move was for security reasons, "FTP part of the code is very old, unsafe and difficult to maintain, we have found a lot of security vulnerabilities."
▲ Source: Ghacks
FTP support discussion on the termination dates back to 2015, when Google and Mozilla engineers began discussing how to remove FTP from Chrome and Firefox browser. Last August, Google has begun to remove the FTP support in Chrome , eliminating the ability to access and view FTP links from the browser. Google originally planned to FTP is disabled by default in Chrome 81, the FTP completely remove the code when Chrome 82 release, but now those plans have been released due to the epidemic and delay.
In fact, Mozilla in 2018 had added an option to disable FTP support in Firefox, but the flag is never enabled by default.
Disabled by default of the FTP protocol from Firefox 77 start, this version is expected to release in June this year. By then, users can still view and download files via FTP, but must be about: config page preferences manually re-enable FTP support.
2021, Mozilla Firefox ultimately will remove all internal FTP protocol code, then also no longer have to re-enable FTP support solutions, Firefox will completely stop processing FTP content.
FTP before being completely removed, Firefox user can control FTP support in the following ways:
- Load about the address bar of your browser: config
- Search network.ftp.enabled
- The preference settings to enable FTP support to TRUE in Firefox
- The preference is set to FALSE to disable FTP support in Firefox