FTP support disappears from Chromium

Future versions of Chrome will lose support for ftp. From version 82, the file transfer protocol will disappear from the browser to increase security, says Google. Moreover, according to the company, few people use FTP in the browser.

Google has emailed a document to Chromium developers called “the intention to remove FTP from Chrome.” It states that it is no longer worth it for Google to support the function.

“Current FTP implementation in Chrome does not support proxies or encrypted connections,” Google wrote in the document. In addition, the company says, the use of FTP connections is so low that it is no longer cost-effective to continue supporting a separate FTP client in the browser. According to the Chrome developers, only 0.1 percent of users still use FTP. “Instead of keeping an insecure implementation, we would prefer to remove the feature altogether,” they write.

Google is gradually rolling out the removal of the functionality. That starts in the Stable versions of version 78. In version 80, more features are removed, and in version 82 they should all be gone. Users who nevertheless open an ftp link in Chrome are redirected to an external ftp program that they have downloaded. The functionality will also apply to browsers that use the Chromium engine, such as Brave, Vivaldi, Opera or Microsoft’s Edge.

It’s not the first time the team behind Chrome has advocated removing FTP functionality from the browser. The first discussion about this started in 2014. Other browser builders, such as Mozilla, also want to get rid of FTP. Firefox has had the option to disable FTP since version 60.