Mozilla is about to stop supporting FTP protocol in Firefox

Recently in an exclusive interview with ZDnet, Michal Novotny, one of the key software engineers of the Firefox team, officially confirmed that Mozilla is planning to remove the ability to support FTP protocol from Future versions of Firefox. Meanwhile, users will no longer be able to download files via FTP, as well as view the content of links and FTP files in Firefox.

Explaining the reason behind this decision, Novotny said:

'We do this for security reasons. FTP is an old protocol and is no longer secure, so there is no reason to continue to maintain this protocol, especially when we have a lot more secure HTTPS. In addition, part of the FTP code is outdated, unsafe, difficult to maintain, and has experienced security flaws in the past. '

As such, Firefox 77 is currently planned to be released by Mozilla in June (but may be later due to the outbreak of Covid-19), which will be the first release to remove the ability to support the protocol. FTP by default. However, for those who still want to continue using this protocol, the FTP support option can be enabled in the about: config custom page.

Also according to Novotny's disclosure, Mozilla will remove all support codes related to the FTP protocol by early 2021. After this time, there will be no way for users to re-enable FTP support on Firefox. On the opposite side, Google also plans to stop supporting FTP on Chrome 82.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol), is a protocol for transferring files from one computer to another via a TCP network or over the Internet. FTP can be considered a traditional method of unsecured (unsecured) file transfer, because according to the original design specification of FTP, there is no way that data can be transmitted in encrypted form. chemistry.