Circa five years ago the browsers dropped FTP support.

#curl still supports it. In 2024, 23% of curl users said they used FTP within the past two years.

My post from April 2020:

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/04/15…

#curl
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

FTP is quite unique in the #curl collection of protocols due to its (weird) mandatory use of a separate TCP connection for the data transfer (and the fact that it can be setup in either direction, client to server or server to client) . It is complicated for users, for sysadmins and it is a complication in source code and internal curl TCP management as well.

So yeah, it also keeps causing us headaches to this day.

#curl
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

while I'm not as much an expert on FTP as I am on SMTP and HTTP, I figure the browsers dropped support for five reasons:

  1. FTP UI design was hard and highly un-weblike
  2. Considerable codebase cruft could be removed
  3. FTPS/SFTP is a mess and had migrated to SSH
  4. Critical mass: this pushed admins to better tech
  5. Google is driving and FTP can't have ads

None of these apply to curl (though I'm not sure about #2 & #3)

This entry was edited (2 months ago)