[chb]

Widely used? By whom? Devs who don't understand rsync or scp? Give me a practical scenario where a box is running FTP but not SSH.

Edit: then account for the fact that this rare breed of content uploader doesn't use an FTP client... there's absolutely no reason to have FTP client code in a browser. It's an attack surface that is utterly unnecessary.

[Demiurge]

Also, the protocol is pretty much a holdover from the earliest days, before encryption, or complicated NATs. I remember using it with just telnet a few times. It's pretty cool, but absolutely nobody should be using FTP these days. I remember saying this back in the 2005, and here we are 20 years later, someone still lamenting dropping FTP support from a browser? I think we're decades overdue.

[tracker1]

I'm not lamenting it being removed.. but will say that it was probably a huge multiple more popular and widely used than XSLT is in the browser.

[Demiurge]

I'm genuinely curious about that. But, this says a lot more about how different these standards are. FTP really needed a good successor, which it never really got. So, there is a strong use case, but technical deficiency to the protocol. So, FTP was overcome by a meriad of web forms and web drive sites, as a way to fill the gap. Still, resumable chunked uploads are really hard to implement from scratch, even now.

Dropping XSLT is about something different. It's not bad an in an obvious way. It's things like code complexity vs applicability. It's definitely not as clear of an argument to me, and I haven't touched XSLT in the past 20 years of web development, so I am not sure about the trade-offs.

[grumbel]

The problem wasn't that FTP got deprecated, but that we never got a proper successor. With FTP you could browse a directory tree like it was a real file system. With HTTP you can't, it has no concept of a directory. rsync is the closest thing to a real successor, but no Web browser support that either.

[catdog]

There would be WebDAV which adds such features to HTTP but that's also not supported by web browsers.

[Demiurge]

I agree that we should get a successor, but if it got deprecated way back, I think we would have more likely gotten one. For just downloads, I have used apache and nginx directory and file listing functionality with ease.

[koakuma-chan]

I worked for a company where I had to make screenshots every minute and upload them via FTP for review to get paid. If there was multiple screenshots with the same thing on the screen, there would be questions.

[ErroneousBosh]

Did you do any work besides taking screenshots and trying to figure out why FTP was broken this time?

Your old job's broken workflow is not a good reason for keeping a fundamentally broken protocol that relies on allowing Remote Code Execution as a privileged user around.

[koakuma-chan]

I wrote a tool that took screenshots automatically and used FileZilla to upload :) And my comment is in support of removing FTP because it was lame.

[ErroneousBosh]

Aha, fair. Why the hell did they need you to do that?

I used to work in a web dev job where when they brought in "time tracking" they wanted everyone to update a spreadsheet with what they were doing every half an hour. A spreadsheet, as literally a .xls, on a shared Windows drive. Everyone spent more time waiting for access to the spreadsheet than they did doing any work.

This situation persisted for about two weeks, and the manager that came up with the genius idea about two weeks longer than that, before we eventually told the other managers we were downing tools and leaving if he didn't either get "promoted to customer" or lay off the charlie during work hours.

[koakuma-chan]

> Why the hell did they need you to do that?

Because it's was a shitty company and I only worked there for one month. I absolutely hate any type of time tracking or attempts to micro manage.

[superkuh]

By many scientific and educational organizations for distribution of data. Places where the outcome matters and the way to achieve it doesn't. An FTP client in a browser is incomparibly smaller attack surface than, say, executing every random program sent to you by arbitrary third parties (javascript).

[altmind]

People who navigate ftp storage maybe? Like Linux repos?

[tracker1]

Linking to an FTP file from a web page.