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Google is killing the open web, part 2

(wok.oblomov.eu)
418 points akagusu | 2 comments | 17 Nov 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.431s | source
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altmind ◴[17 Nov 25 16:23 UTC] No.45955071[source]▶
Do you remember that chrome lost FTP support recently? The protocol was widely used and simple enough.
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chb ◴[17 Nov 25 16:32 UTC] No.45955175[source]▶
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.

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Demiurge ◴[17 Nov 25 16:41 UTC] No.45955278[source]▶
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.
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1. tracker1 ◴[17 Nov 25 16:52 UTC] No.45955397[source]▶
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.
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2. Demiurge ◴[17 Nov 25 17:10 UTC] No.45955598[source]▶
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.