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Built-in FTP implementation to be removed in Firefox 90

Last year, the Firefox platform development team announced plans to remove the built-in FTP implementation from the browser. FTP is a protocol for transferring files from one host to another.

The implementation is currently disabled in the Firefox Nightly and Beta pre-release channels and will be disabled when Firefox 88 is released on April 19, 2021. The implementation will be removed in Firefox 90.  After FTP is disabled in Firefox, the browser will delegate ftp:// links to external applications in the same manner as other protocol handlers.

With the deprecation, browserSettings.ftpProtocolEnabled will become read-only. Attempts to set this value will have no effect.

Most places where an extension may pass “ftp” such as filters for proxy or webRequest should not result in an error, but the APIs will no longer handle requests of those types.

To help offset this removal, ftp  has been added to the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions. This means that extensions will be able to prompt users to launch a FTP application to handle certain links.

Please let us if you have any questions on our developer community forum.

One comment on “Built-in FTP implementation to be removed in Firefox 90”

  1. hyp wrote on

    Thanks for the update but could this code removal be delayed until after Firefox 91 (i.e. code removed in FF 92) since this will be after the next ESR? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar