Chrome Will Soon Stop Supporting FTP Connections

We’re not sure how many of you might remember, but back in the day, FTP servers were a popular way to host files online as well as to download them. These days, file hosting and downloading is done in a completely different manner, which is why it’s not surprising that Google has ultimately decided that they will soon stop supporting FTP connections in Chrome.

According to the Chrome developer team, they have determined that the usage of FTP is so low that removing support shouldn’t be too much of an issue for users. “The current FTP implementation in Google Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. We would like to deprecate and remove this remaining functionality rather than maintain an insecure FTP implementation.”

That being said, in addition to low usage, Android Police has pointed out that the protocol does suffer from quite a bit of vulnerabilities, meaning that it’s probably not the most secure way of hosting or downloading files online to begin with. We’re not sure how many of you will miss FTP support in Chrome, but note that Mozilla had also previously stated their plans to eventually remove support for it in Firefox as well, although that has yet to happen.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Chrome, Google, Security