Furthermore, the article notes the Mozilla’s security team statement regarding FTP’s use as an attack vector for threat actors engaged in malware campaigns. Google Chrome ended FTP support with the release of version 88 in December.Īccording to a ZDNet article, even though FTP remains a popular, low-cost option for moving files between computers, FTP is “burdened by enough security issues that browser makers are dropping support for the protocol.”įiles exchanged via FTP are sent in the clear and are not encrypted, thus they are inherently non-secure. Security measures demand that things change and this sure looks like it.Not sure if you noticed, but Mozilla recently announced it was dropping file transfer protocol (FTP) support in version 90 of its popular Firefox browser. Michael Novotny, a software engineer at Mozilla, said last year that FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS if you are downloading resources. This will also be applied to Firefox on Android. Two releases after Firefox 88, Firefox 90 will arrive without the FTP implementation. What this means is that the extensions will be able to prompt users to launch an FTP app to handle the links that need the implementation. She wrote that to offset the effects of the removal, FTP has been added to the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions. However, she added that the APIs will no longer be handling these requests.

What can users expect?įirefox says that after disabling and later ripping out FTP, every time the function is triggered, it will be passed on to an external application.Ĭaitlin Neiman, Mozilla’s add-ons community manager, said that in most places where an extension may pass ‘FTP like filters for proxy or webRequest, there should be no error.

For general release, FTP will be disabled beginning with Firefox 88 (April 19th). It also said that the move would be delayed because of the pandemic and how it turned out to be worse than we may have imagined at first.īy February, FTP was disabled on the browser’s nightly channel and Beta channel currently.

A year ago, the browser announced that it was going to disable support for FTP. The browser is planning to rip out its FTP implementation and pass on the job to other applications. FTP links will no longer be handled by Mozilla Firefox.

Mozilla ftp