Last year, Mozilla announced plans to phase out integrated FTP implementation in your browser. After Chrome, Firefox would stop supporting this technology as of June 2020, although finally the execution of the decision was not carried out due to the pandemic. Up to now.
The protocol for transferring files from a host to another, especially popular a few years ago and which is still used today to upload files to web hosts, for example, it will finally be no longer supported in the Mozilla browser with the arrival of Firefox 90 in a week.
Currently, the implementation is disabled in the pre-release channels of Firefox Nightly and Beta and will be disabled when Firefox 88 is released on April 19, 2021, as reported by the development team.
External applications to the rescue
When we try to open an FTP link from Firefox, when Firefox 88 is launched and the support is disabled, the browser will try that we can execute it through an external application such as, for example, a free and open source FTP application such as FileZilla or WinSCP.
Firefox, when we try to access an FTP link, it will try to allow us to execute it through an external application
There is the paradox that Firefox maintains an FTP server in which it keeps each and every one of the versions that have been released to date. A fantasy from the world of software that, beyond a nostalgic rarity, it is very useful when certain types of services only support outdated versions. We are talking, for example, of the National Currency and Stamp Factory of Spain that, to obtain a digital certificate, requests to install version 68 of Firefox.
The reason for Mozilla and Google to remove FTP support from their browsers seems simple: a very small percentage of users continue to use it. That, at least, is what Google explained at the time.