From: Lennart Sorensen via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
I don't think any of the browsers do ftp links anymore.
FTP was a very early protocol. In retrospect, it wasn't designed very well. Or at least not designed following conventions that arose later. One problem arose with Network Addres (and port) Translation (NAT should be called NAPT because the port gets mapped too). I don't completely remember the details, but the negotiation and the transmission use two different ports and the port number for transmission is embedded in a message so NAT system needs to actually 1) understand that this is an FTP negotiation 2) decode some of the messages to find out what port will be used. I seem to remember that some NAT systems read the port from a fixed place in the message but the protocol specs don't dictate a fixed position: it's just an ASCII message. There are also security issues. Most things with FTP sites let you fetch with HTTPS, much more secure. When I first had access to the internet, FTP was the most important capability. I admit that email would have been more important but I was already on usenet.