After alerting the intended withdrawal for a long time, Google has finally removed FTP with its latest Chrome 95. The new browser version bears no code for this feature, indicating permanent removal.
Google Chrome Removed FTP
Google has recently rolled out the latest Chrome 95 stable release with FTP removed for good. As evident from the Chrome roadmap, the tech giant has removed the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) feature code, ensuring no more support.
Elaborating further on this removal, Google stated in its feature update,
Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition, more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.
Consequently, the tech giant kept rolling out gradual changes to deprecate this feature, demonstrating the latest move with Chrome 87 to disable FTP by default. However, it still allowed users to enable it as needed.
Nonetheless, these steps made Chrome render an insecure FTP implementation, compelling Google to remove it altogether.
Remaining capabilities of Google Chrome’s FTP implementation are restricted to either displaying a directory listing or downloading a resource over unencrypted connections. We would like to deprecate and remove this remaining functionality rather than maintain an insecure FTP implementation.
This isn’t an exclusive move from Google, though. Given the underlying security risks associated with FTP, numerous browsers have adopted this approach. One of them is Mozilla that also announced removing FTP implementation with Firefox 90, citing the same security concerns that Google did. Similarly, Apple Safari also doesn’t support FTP already.
However, Microsoft is yet to do the same with its Edge browser (which also runs on Chromium). But it will likely follow the same in the future.
Let us know your thought in the comments.
