[kbolino]

There are multiple reasons why FTP by itself became obsolete. Some of them I can think of off the top of my head:

1) Passive mode. What is it and why do I need it? Well, you see, back in the old days, .... It took way too long for this critical "option" to become well supported and used by default.

2) Text mode. No, I don't want you to corrupt some of my files based on half-baked heuristics about what is and isn't a text file, and it doesn't make any sense to rewrite line endings anymore anyway.

3) Transport security. FTPS should have become the standard decades ago, but it still isn't to this day. If you want to actually transfer files using an FTP-like interface today, you use SFTP, which is a totally different protocol built on SSH.

[rkagerer]

Why would you say FTP is obsolete? For what it's worth, I still use it (for bulk file transfer).

[joecool1029]

chrome and firefox dropped support for it 5 years or so ago, it has had a lot of security issues over the years, was annoying over NAT, and there are better options for secure bulk transfers (sftp, rsync, etc)

[rkagerer]

I see, I assumed by ftp you also meant sftp.

[efreak]

Depending on your hardware (SBC), FTP can also be several times faster than SFTP for transferring files over a LAN. Though I'll admit to having used other protocols like torrents for large files that had bad transfers or other issues (low-quality connection issues causing dropped connections, etc).

[kbolino]

TFTP is also a good choice for transferring files over trusted networks to/from underpowered devices.