Mozilla removes ftp function from Firefox 90

Mozilla permanently removes the ftp function from Firefox 90, which should be released in June. The developer announces this on its website. Mozilla previously announced that this feature would be removed from Firefox, but did not announce when exactly this would happen.

Mozilla says in a blog post that the feature will be disabled by default starting with Firefox 88, although users can still enable the feature from the about:config page, using the network.ftp.enabled option. In Firefox 90, the feature will be permanently removed. The corresponding flag becomes read-only in that version, which means that users can no longer manually enable the feature.

Mozilla announces that ftp has been added to the list of protocol_handlers. As a result, users are given the option to open ftp:// links in an external application when they are entered into the browser. The browser itself therefore no longer provides access to such FTP sites.

Removing ftp from Firefox comes as no surprise. Mozilla already reported last year that the feature would be removed from the web browser in 2021. The feature was supposed to be disabled in Firefox 77 by default, but Mozilla later postponed it. FTP has been disabled by default in Google’s Chrome browser since version 88 and will be removed from the codebase in Chrome 91.