Google is killing the open web, part 2

Do you remember that chrome lost FTP support recently? The protocol was widely used and simple enough.

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.

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.

I worked for a company where I had to make screenshots every minute and upload them via FTP for review to get paid. If there was multiple screenshots with the same thing on the screen, there would be questions.

Did you do any work besides taking screenshots and trying to figure out why FTP was broken this time?

Your old job's broken workflow is not a good reason for keeping a fundamentally broken protocol that relies on allowing Remote Code Execution as a privileged user around.

I wrote a tool that took screenshots automatically and used FileZilla to upload :) And my comment is in support of removing FTP because it was lame.

Aha, fair. Why the hell did they need you to do that?

I used to work in a web dev job where when they brought in "time tracking" they wanted everyone to update a spreadsheet with what they were doing every half an hour. A spreadsheet, as literally a .xls, on a shared Windows drive. Everyone spent more time waiting for access to the spreadsheet than they did doing any work.

This situation persisted for about two weeks, and the manager that came up with the genius idea about two weeks longer than that, before we eventually told the other managers we were downing tools and leaving if he didn't either get "promoted to customer" or lay off the charlie during work hours.