After disabling FTP support in Google Chrome 81, Google decided to re-enable it again to prevent disruptions and difficulties in accessing information during the coronavirus pandemic.
Since 2014, Google has wanted to remove support for the FTP protocol in Chrome, as it was only used by “1-2%” of the browser’s users, with a slightly higher percentage among Linux.
At the end of 2018, with FTP support WONTFIX in Chrome for iOS, Google began its plan to slowly retire FTP support in the desktop.
This new plan would start by continuing to display FTP directory listings, but it would no longer display the files in the browser but would instead "download" them.
“Rather than using the required resources via FTP, it is preferable to download them,” the statement said. “We will still have to make directory entries, but we will not do anything else, i.e. ftp://ftp.hp.com/ will do the same exciting listing you see today, while ftp://ftp.hp .com / pub / test2 / test2 will result in downloading a file `test2`.
FTP is an insecure legacy protocol. We have WONTFIXed FTP support on iOS, but its usage in Blink-based Chrome is high enough that it's difficult to remove it all at once. This seems like a logical way to reduce its viability as an attack surface as a step toward more complete removal.
Starting with Chrome 80, Google began to phase out FTP support by adding the flag “chrome://flags/#enable-ftp”, which controls whether FTP support is enabled or not.
FTP support was enabled by default in this version, but Google conducted a test where it was disabled for 1% of its user base to see if there were any complaints or content access issues
The plan was ultimately to disable FTP support by default in Chrome 81, but allow it re- enabled using the #enable-ftp flag.
FTP reactivated due to the coronavirus crisis
On April 9, Google engineer Asanka Herath posted in the “Removing built-in support for FTP from Chrome” Chromium bug thread that “In light of the current crisis, we are going to ‘ignore’ FTP in the stable channel of Chrome. FTP will start working again.”
Enabling FTP support by default is done to make sure there is no problem with people accessing content on FTP sites during the pandemic.
For example, many government agencies still use FTP sites, including the National Institutes of Health.
FTP deprecation in Chrome will resume once " people are in a better position to deal with potential outages and migrations."
