Mozilla disables FTP support by default in Firefox 77

Mozilla will disable the browser’s FTP functionality by default in version 77 of Firefox, which should be released in June. FTP support should be completely out by the beginning of 2021. According to Mozilla, ftp is not secure and is not used often enough to maintain.

FTP will still be enabled by default in the extended support release of Firefox 78, according to Mozilla, but that’s also the last thing Mozilla does for ftp. After that, Firefox will reference the operating system to handle urls starting with ftp://. Since version 60 from 2018, Firefox already has a flag in about:config for enabling or disabling ftp support.

Google is slightly ahead of Mozilla in this regard. Last year it was already announced that the end is in sight for FTP support in Chrome. There, the function will be phased out with effect from version 78. The stable branch of Chrome is now at version 80. In version 82 ftp will be completely gone. However, Chrome updates are now on hold due to the coronavirus, so this move has been delayed.

The Mozilla dev of the posting describes ftp as “unsafe, old and difficult to maintain”. Building in support for more secure variants like sftp is an option, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about that. “There is no reason to prefer ftp over https when downloading,” he says. In Google’s motivation to phase out FTP, it stated that only 0.1 percent of users were still using FTP.