Mozilla has completely ended support for the FTP protocol as of Firefox version 90.
Mozilla announced that the Firefox web browser will not support the FTP protocol as of Firefox version 90. Rumors about the removal of FTP support in Firefox and Chrome first surfaced in 2015, but it took until 2018 for Mozilla to introduce a preference to disable FTP support in the browser. Confirmation that FTP support will be removed from Firefox came in 2020. Although Mozilla plans to remove support in Firefox 77, it has delayed for a while. On the other hand, Google had already removed FTP support from its Chrome browser.
Mozilla has posted a deprecation timeline on the organization’s Add-ons blog. FTP support is already turned off by default in Firefox 88 version. The developer says the FTP protocol is a security risk for users.
Firefox issues a warning whenever a user tries to upload an FTP address. Installed FTP programs are displayed in the list, but if there are none, the list is blank. Firefox users who need to access FTP resources may want to control WinSCP and make it the default FTP handler in the browser.
How to Restore FTP for Firefox 88 and 89?
The FTP code is not completely removed in Firefox 88, and users can change the preference to restore FTP support in Firefox 88 and 89. Mozilla has completely removed FTP in Firefox version 90.
Load the about: config file in the Firefox address bar.
Confirm that you will be careful.
Search for ftp.enabled.
Set the value to TRUE by double-clicking the row or left-clicking the toggle icon.
When the value is set to TRUE, Firefox will open FTP resources again. As we mentioned at the beginning, this Firefox works until the 90’s.
