Chrome Canary in v80 today added a flag that allows users to “enable support for FTP URLs”, Chromium team confirms this flag will be available during the FTP turn-down Period.
We’ve reported about Google’s announcement that Chrome future versions will no longer support File Transfer Protocol, known as FTP. According to plans, the support for FTP will deprecate beginning from Chrome 80 stable onwards, with Chrome 82, FTP code and its resources will be completely removed.
All modern browsers such as Safari, Microsoft Edge (not Chromium), Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer support FTP. After considering FTP low usage and as it doesn’t support encrypted connections, the Chrome team no longer wants to invest resources in supporting the legacy protocol, that’s why Google has decided to “deprecate and remove support for FTP URLs”.
Google has set the following timeline for the feature depreciation in the Chrome browser
Chrome 79 (2019Q4): Finch Controlled flag and enterprise policy for controlling overall FTP support. FTP Support will be disabled on pre-release channels.
Chrome 80 (2020Q1): Gradual turndown of FTP Support on stable.
Chrome 82 (2020Q2): Removal of FTP Code and resources.
To enable support for FTP URLs in Chrome 80 stable, you need to do the following.
1. Visit chrome://flags/#enable-ftp
2. Select “Enabled” and restart the browser.
When the flag is enabled, Chrome ” will handle navigations to ftp: // URLs by either showing a directory listing or downloading the resource over FTP”.
When disabled, Chrome “has no special handling for ftp : // URLs and by default defer handling of the URL to the underlying platform”.