14 DAY TRIAL // Developers of the Chrome and Firefox browsers are pondering the idea of removing built-in support for FTP links from their respective browsers, as gHacks reports.
At first, there was the Chrome team that proposed the idea, which last month spread to the Firefox bug tracker as well.
With around 0.1-0.2% of all weekly traffic going to FTP links, but with Chrome users in the one billion range, this translates to approximately 2 million users over a 7-day period.
Google wants to move FTP support to an extension or an app
"With the combination of the sockets API and the downloads API it may be possible to construct a Chrome App which handles this well," said the Chrome team. "Also would need a way to be able to register an app/extension to handle a particular URL scheme so that navigations would be seamless for users of FTP apps."
While the Chrome team has already a plan in place for implementing this new feature, the most recent bug on the Firefox project tracker hasn't had any responses yet.
Moving FTP support out of the core will probably take years
Firefox devs will likely want to remove FTP support from their browser as well, especially since they're running a custom UI for whenever navigating to FTP links, UI that could lighten up the browser's core and reduce maintenance operations.
Moving a core Firefox feature to an add-on is not something unheard of, Firefox devs having considered at one point moving their Tab Groups (Panorama) feature to an extension as well.
This was proposed back in 2013, and not even to this day has it materialized. So if FTP support ever gets ejected from the Firefox or Google Chrome cores, it will probably take a while longer.
