After disabling File Transfer Protocol (FTP) functionality, the code will be removed in Firefox 90.
The FTP feature of Mozilla Firefox will soon be transferred onto other applications, as Mozilla will seek out its Firefox’s FTP implementation.
About a year ago, Mozilla stated that they might temporarily disable support for FTP, but they also said that they might delay the move depending on how the pandemic turns out.
By February, FTP was disabled in Firefox’s nightly channel and it is currently also disabled in the Beta channel. For general release, FTP will be disabled in Firefox 88 releasing on April 19.
At this point, when Firefox encounters an FTP link, it will attempt to pass it off to an external application or extensions like FileZilla, FireFTP, and more.
“Most places where an extension may pass ‘FTP such as filters for proxy or web request should not result in an error, but the APIs will no longer handle requests of these types,” Mozilla add-ons community manager Caitlin Neiman wrote 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 an FTP application to handle certain links.”
Two release cycles later in late June, Firefox 90 will have the FTP implementation removed altogether. This will also impact Firefox on Android.
“FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS for downloading resources,” Mozilla software engineer Michal Novotny said the previous year.
“Also, a part of the FTP code is very old, unsafe, and hard to maintain, and we found a lot of security bugs in it in the past.”
