Mozilla is phasing out its Firefox browser’s FTP features. Firefox will soon pass off FTP requests to other applications, as Mozilla begins to phase out the popular browser’s FTP features in the next stable release.
Although Mozilla had announced its intentions to disable support for the FTP protocol last year but saw the plan delayed due to the global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
FTP handles file transfers between a server and a client but is no longer considered a secure way to transferring files. FTP will be disabled by default in Firefox 88, which is scheduled for an April 19 release. All code relating to FTP will be removed altogether with the June release of Firefox 90.
“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,” wrote Mozilla add-ons manager Caitlin Neiman in a blog post.
“To help offset this removal, ftp has been added to the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions. This means that extensions will be able to prompt users to launch a FTP application to handle certain links.”
When Firefox 90 is released, users will need to use a dedicated FTP app to access remote servers.
(Via MacRumors)
