[darren_]

No it isn't. It's a bug that web browsers had FTP support in the first place - that's the job of FTP clients, browsers should just be handing off the link to one of them. cf the 'mailto' URI scheme - I think we've all come around to agreeing that web browsers shouldn't also be email clients.

[DeathArrow]

Since the only job of an a browser seems to spit out whatever http protocol says, we can conclude that it is not its job to actually render HTML and interpret Javascript because the HTTP protocol says nothing about HTML or Javascript or Web Assembly.

[lapinot]

Email is of course out of scope. But i'd be happy to integrate file browsers (local and remote) and web browsers, for everything file transfer, markup rendering and multimedia viewing. Of course that shouldn't be monolithic, with pluggable viewer programs. Several parts could be:

- navigation (contains: bookmark, history, tab/window handling, etc)

- networking (contains: configuring proxies, credentials+cookies, traffic shapping, requests filtering/rewriting, caching+capture+replay)

- content display (html rendering + js sandboxes, userscripts and content filtering, pdf, multimedia, ..)

[torstenvl]

Can you provide a real example from the wild where mailto: linked to a file for download? Because otherwise it's hard to see how that's a counterexample to the principle I articulated, which is specifically about downloading files, a function web browsers perform routinely.

[scrollaway]

magnet: links link to a file to download. Web browsers don’t handle these. ipfs as well. And plenty more …

FTP has nothing exceptional to it beyond it being a shitty, old protocol that is much more rarely used than BitTorrent.

[soundnote]

The Vivaldi development team firmly disagrees.