That's funny, because I remember Firefox starting as "Phoenix", a very lightweight browser free from the bloat of Netscape.
I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP sometimes screw up hours of downloading with ASCII mode.
FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort, and was never a good fit for something like a web browser anyway. The directory listing is an atrocity because it's made for human eyes and requires a dozen different parsers for automation depending on variety. The mess with the passive/ASCII stuff requires the user to understand those are things that exist and what they may want. And the hacky anonymous download access was achieved by giving the user instructions in the login banner.
All those things are really not suitable for anything that aims to make it simple to download on click.
> FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort
GUIs did not exist when FTP was made. Frankly, the concept of user accounts didn't either, so the anonymous access hack was a product of its time and not an intentional design decision.
I am confused though, because FTP being a protocol means it is fairly standardized in terms of commands and expected output right? Are there FTP servers that spat out wildly different responses to typical commands? Because if so, SMTP/POP3 should suffer from the same thing, but I don't recall many email client developers complaining about it.
FTP's directory listing command provides the output of 'ls'. Or 'dir', if on Windows. Or a bunch of other variations.
That's because it was made to be shown to a human using a commandline client, and wasn't intended to be parsed. As a result, a FTP client like Firefox needs to parse about a dozen possible versions, plus there's a standard for actual machine-readable listings that may still not be universally supported.
Anonymous access was typically announced in the welcome message, with something along the lines of "Login as user ftp, pass ftp for anonymous access". Again, made for humans reading that.
And besides that, it has annoying design quirks like that "download done" is just closing the socket.
My point is that FTP is a remarkably annoying protocol for something like Firefox to implement. It involves figuring out how to parse stuff that wasn't made to be parsed, guessing common anonymous account names and passwords, and dealing with ASCII/binary active/passive modes. The nature of a program like Firefox clashes with the protocol badly.
Proper GUI clients show all the messages the FTP server is producing because sometimes it's just a necessity. It's always possible that there will be something the client won't be able to deal with automatically.
If you were a user of FTP/SMTP/POP3 software in the 90s, you definitely saw a regular stream of developer/operator complaints. The last 20 years saw a lot of diversity loss in popular protocols (DIEDIEDIE!) and we now use a narrow subset of them.
I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP sometimes screw up hours of downloading with ASCII mode.
FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort, and was never a good fit for something like a web browser anyway. The directory listing is an atrocity because it's made for human eyes and requires a dozen different parsers for automation depending on variety. The mess with the passive/ASCII stuff requires the user to understand those are things that exist and what they may want. And the hacky anonymous download access was achieved by giving the user instructions in the login banner.
All those things are really not suitable for anything that aims to make it simple to download on click.