Mozilla has announced today its plans to eliminate its support for the FTP protocol (File Transfer Protocol), widely used for years to download files (for example, institutional repositories) and which is still used for such tasks as uploading files to web hosts.
FTP is based on sending remote files without encrypting, which, in the words of Michal Novotny, software engineer, Mozilla Corporation, has led developers to consider it “an insecure protocol”.
“There is No reason to prefer it to HTTPS for download resources. In addition, a part of the FTP code is very old, unsafe and difficult to maintain, and we have found many security bugs in the past.”
Two years looking for the right time
Ago two years the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to remove this support of your web browser, but until now had not wanted to handle specific dates.
Now we know: in June 2020once that is released the version 77 stable of Firefox, this support will be disabled by default. Not ‘deleted’, still, then this step will be, according to Novotny, in the coming year: simply force users to manipulate the settings of Firefox if you want to have access to the protocol.
How is it possible to enable the support during these months of margin? Easy: there will be no more than access to ‘about:config’ through the address bar of the browser, search for the section “network.ftp.enabled“and change its value ‘false‘by ‘true‘.
Eye, because if what you want is to get rid of FTP, no need to wait until the summer: we can perform the same operation, but setting its value to ‘false’ in this case.
Google Chrome has also influenced
Without a doubt, may have influenced this decision is the fact that the developers of Google Chrome will own almost immediately: in the version 81 of this browser support is to be disabled, and with the arrival of the 82 (originally planned for late spring or early next summer, though the coronavirus will delay these deadlines) will be directly deleted.
According to Google, which already announced its intentions in August 2019, one of the things that most weighed when opting to dispense with the FTP was that only a tiny percentage of their user base so they continued to use. From now on, Chrome pass the access to a FTP address to the file manager of the operating system of turn (and it is expected that Firefox would opt for the same solution).
Via | ZDnet
–
The news
Chrome and Firefox will no longer support the technology FTP this summer
it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Marcos Merino
.
