Mozila Blocks FTP Code

The handling of clicking on FTP links from within Firefox will soon be passed to other applications, as Mozilla will rip out Firefox’s FTP implementation.Mozilla announced its intention to shortly disable support for FTP, one year back but it also said it would delay the move pending how the pandemic turned out.

FTP was disabled in Firefox’s nightly channel and it is currently also disabled in the Beta channel starting this year and For general release, FTP will be disabled in Firefox 88 released on April 19.

“Most places where an extension may pass ‘ftp’ such as filters for proxy or webRequest should not result in an error, but the APIs will no longer handle requests of those types,”

To help offset this removal, ftp has been added to the list of supported protocol handlers for browser extensions. This means that extensions will be able to prompt users to launch a FTP application to handle certain links.

FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS for downloading resources.Two release cycles later in late June, Firefox 90 will have the FTP implementation removed altogether. This will also impact Firefox on Android.