Do not drop FTP support
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@danfiscus I absolute agree with your very well argued points. I also really hope Vivaldi will keep supporting the FTP protocol, simply because it's always been a part of the browsers I use, and I've come to rely on it being available when I need it.
Just a small correction; 0.1% of a billion is a million, not hundred million
And knowing Google and the numbers they deal with, a million is nothing, zilch, nada, they couldn't care less about us... unfortunately
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@danfiscus I'm with you. I'd like to see FTP support kept, as well.
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So, just to clarify a couple things before addressing the numbers… other readers can skim down to the third section (3 horizontal rules) if they don't want to read about streaming videos on your local network and get to the part relevant to this feature request.
@danfiscus said in Do not drop FTP support:
I access FTP websites all the time, primarily for a small fileserver I have in my house. It's not accessible to the outside internet, and it runs from Windows 10, so SFTP or FTPS are not really viable options.
Briefly, FTP isn't a World Wide Web protocol, HTTP was created to get past its shortcomings and its incompatibility with the web's paradigm. FTP was never designed to be secure, so a few decades later they slapped FTPS on it to get a bare minimum of security. With FTP everything is sent in the clear, including usernames and passwords. SFTP is an unrelated protocol that has no interoperability with FTP. Ironically, SFTP actually doesn't do any encryption or authentication. It is intended to be used as a subsystem on an already secure data stream like SSH, for which it was designed. Windows is capable of running an FTPS server or an SSH server, so not sure why they aren't viable, however there are better ways for watching your videos, see the next section.
it's nice to be able to click on a video on an FTP site and watch the video from within the browser, instead of downloading the whole file from an FTP client, then watching it while it is stored locally, then deleting it later. This is especially important to me on Android, as I have had no luck setting up FTP in a dedicated app, and even if I could, again I would have to download the whole file first.
Might I suggest you look into things like Plex and Kodi? I use both of them for the exact use cases you describe, minus the FTP protocol. Since it's your local network, you can easily access them over SMB and end up with a richer and more flexible experience. It's so simple yet so useful that I've even got my sexagenarian parents using it.
Even if you don't want to use those specific solutions for some reason, I'd still recommend dropping the FTP server and use SMB/Samba instead. Accessing the server like that, you can play the videos directly from the file share in VLC. One thing that makes this vastly superior to the FTP server is being able to start the video wherever you want. Using FTP, you have to sit around and wait for it download all of the video content you want to skip until you've finally gotten to the point where you want to start. With the file share, you just jump to the timecode you want, there is a brief delay while VLC fills the buffer to whatever you have it set for (and possibly also while the server's hard disks spin up) and then starts playing.
Any of these solutions is a much better way to watch video than using FTP. If you want more info, have any questions, need some help or want a little guidance on setting that up, shoot me a PM. I run 3 HTPCs in our house, all pulling video from a common 5 HDD array on the network, with an antenna hidden behind the blinds in the window that goes to a 4-way TV tuner which is connected to the network --- that allows all 3 HTPCs to watch a different OTA channel while also recording a 4th to DVR. I can stream the video to our phones as well. I've got Kodi, Plex and VLC on my phone, though to be honest I rarely watch video on it. Mostly I use the phone as a Kodi remote control for the TVs, and sometimes to do some admin work on the Plex server.
And now the numbers and this feature request...
However, the 0.01% figure you cited is incorrect. In the document linked by @madiso Google reports that 0.1% of desktop Windows Chrome users actually accessed FTP, and that's over a much shorter period of one week!
Yeah, I pulled my 0.01% from that study (although I was reading discussions about it elsewhere such as the bug report for this issue). I cited that number instead of the 0.1% because it is more accurate. The 0.1% is only for 1 sku of Chrome on 1 platform over the course of only 1 week. That's not even all Windows users, let alone all desktop users. The 0.01% is all platforms over the course of 28 days. It's similar to a batter on a "hot streak" in baseball -- over a week or two, or even three, they might be getting a hit every game and have a very high batting average over that time period. But a couple more months later, his batting average has fallen closer to what you'd expect him to be hitting. It's a phenomenon sometimes called regression towards the mean, the more data you collect over a greater timeframe the closer the sample's average should be to the true mean. There's even discussion that the percentage should continue to fall if data were collected over a longer period, perhaps a year.
Furthermore, the percentage of TLDs accessed over that same time period was a measly 0.0008%, that corresponds to people who did a directory listing, as you would do when logging into the FTP server intentionally, rather than having a subresource of the page you're viewing load over FTP. It would also include people who clicked a link that took them to a directory on an FTP server, but we have no way to separate out those from the people who are purposefully accessing an FTP server and initiating the connection themselves.
So most of the people who are "using" FTP in the browser are most likely unaware that they are doing so. They be just as unaware when Chrome no longer supports FTP and the website owners update their pages to serve those resources over a more secure protocol, as they should have done many years ago. Some of the remaining minority who were using the browser as an FTP client will switch to using an actual FTP client, and some will probably install the extension.
I could continue here and calculate the number of FTP users that would likely be effected by Vivaldi's removal of FTP, but instead I'll just quickly ballpark by pointing out a few corrections to the math. First, there's what XXXYYYZZZ pointed out, that your result was 2 orders of magnitude too large, and then also point out that Vivaldi doesn't have 1 billion users, they have 1.2 million that's 3 orders of magnitude less than Chrome. Then there's another order of magnitude if we're use the more accurate 0.1% or 3 orders of magnitude if we use the percentage of users who are intentionally using FTP. So we can use 6 orders of magnitude as an upper bound, which brings the 100,000,000 down to 100 users. We're probably losing accuracy going smaller, but let's consider than about half the total users of Vivaldi are community members.
Now, even though the 0.01% is more accurate for Chrome's user base, I am more than willing to concede that it is not entire applicable to Vivaldi, and sure, let's use your number instead, multiplying the result by 10 to get 1,000. Most of those users will be "using" FTP just by surfing the web and having a page load an image or a video over FTP. That's should all be fixed, and those users will be none-the-wiser. For the minority that are actually navigating FTP servers with the browser, some will take the opportunity to switch to a proper FTP client, Filezilla is a decent FOSS option available on all the desktop platforms that Vivaldi is. On Android I recommend Solid Explorer's FTP extension, it makes transferring files between the phone and server so easy. Some of them may feel uncomfortable with a new installation, and they will use the extension that will be available to enable FTP in the browser.
Now, let's consider the impact to Vivaldi's small team. Currently, FTP code is upstream. To drop native support for FTP and end up with a more secure browser because of it, they have to do nothing. To maintain FTP support, or even enhance it to include FTPS, would require that they backport the code that is eliminated, and then write their own code for FTPS.
It just doesn't make sense take resources away from the rest of the browser to implement a feature that can be had by installing an extension for a few hundred users (if that many) while increasing the attack surface of the browser and stealing time away from more important features.
So that's my argument for why this isn't a good idea. If you want any tips or guidance with Kodi, Plex, VLC, SMB, etc. for watching your videos from your server, send me a PM, er it's called chat in this forum. I'm happy to lend a hand; I've done the same for numerous people with similar setups and guided them on how to take advantage of some of the unique scenarios it enables.
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Thinking through this again, what if Vivaldi removed the FTP support that is provided by Google and added a new file viewer that supports FTPS, SFTP, SSH and BitTorrent? The latter would align with Opera 12, where torrents were directly supported. And yes, I didn't forget FTP, that is still insecure and should not be promoted anymore.
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@madiso It would be great to have built-in support for these protocols. But I wouldn't have high hopes for it happening any time soon. It would be a lot of work to implement clients for them.
As for FTP, I still think it has relevance. Several game publishers still use FTP links for downloads of patches and so on. They would have to implement their servers as HTTP instead and not everyone has the resources to do this, no matter what the Silicon Valley types with their pockets full of $$$ think.
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@Pathduck said in Do not drop FTP support:
As for FTP, I still think it has relevance. Several game publishers still use FTP links for downloads of patches and so on. They would have to implement their servers as HTTP instead and not everyone has the resources to do this, no matter what the Silicon Valley types with their pockets full of $$$ think.
Well, Google wouldn't kill the standard either way. When you talk about patches, it sounds like something implemented within the game or game launcher itself, not something that's user facing. Similarly HTTP is still widely used in APT (disclaimer: I do not agree with that reasoning), the Debian package manager, but user-facing webpages should not use it nowadays.
Don't forget that insecure downloads overall will also get deprecated soon in Chromium
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Do not drop FTP support:
FTP support is not dropped, i checked it in internal 3.6.2175.* daily version and 3.5 Stable and 3.6 Snapshot.
It's even reactivated in latest Chromium Dev' 90.0.4404.0 (without any flags change or switch to run browser)
FTP will perhaps be deprecated later : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=333943#c43
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I've just upgraded to Vivaldi 4.1.2369.11 (Stable channel) stable (64-bit) and it's not even settable in the vivaldi://flags area!
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@cmulloy Open
chrome://flags/#temporary-unexpire-flags-m91, set to Enable and restart, openchrome://flags/#enable-ftp, set to Enable and restart.
May work some while. -
@doctorg said in Do not drop FTP support:
chrome://flags/#temporary-unexpire-flags-m91
Thanks doctorg for that Tip! I'll try it out!
Although I'm having another issue with passwords not being saved which unfortunately may push me back to using Firefox
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The ftp flags do not exist anymore in 4.3 Stable.
FTP support is dead now on Vivaldi 4.3 and 4.4 :rip:
