The same could have been said of Gopher. FTP is typically insecure and painful to use with it's varying port maps. Transferring files over HTTP or more modern protocols is the future.
Transferring files over HTTP or more modern protocols is the future
My direct and blunt rebuttal is "I don't care". The future is worthless without the present, and more importantly, the past. The continued effective destruction of history that these big tech companies are doing with their actions is a disturbing trend.
FTP in PASV mode operates very similarly to HTTP, and is no more insecure. With an organization the size of Google and the Chrome team, they should be able to make it work.
Honest question: Has anyone not used FTP in PASV mode in the last 20 years over the internet?
I think it's pretty much a given since most clients change to PASV mode as a first step. And it's rare that people have a port open to them (behind all firewalls, etc)
Not all servers work with passive mode. For active, the onus on keeping it working is on me -- and that's easy, it's a trivial bit of firewall config. (conntrack_ftp)
The same was said of Gopher. When Mozilla dropped support for the protocol in Firefox 4.0, there was a brief outcry, followed by silence as everyone realized that the protocol had been effectively unused for decades already.
Firefox did remove its support for it, but the support could easily be added back with an extension.
I am more worried about the very realistic that that Google would be dropping FTP from search results, seeing as how their users won't be able to open them in the Google browser.
