> Eventually ftp was mostly subsumed by web browsers speaking the FTP protocol themselves. This is why you may occasionally still see URLs with an "ftp:" service prefix; this informs the browser that it should expect to speak to an FTP server rather than an HTTP/HTTPS server.
In the earlier days of the web, it was not totally uncommon to see people hosting their home pages on an FTP server rather than an HTTP server. Netscape and IE both spoke FTP just fine, and for some people, access to an FTP account was more convenient than paying for separate web hosting. Or settling for GeoCities. If the page had a lot of images, it was quite a bit slower than HTTP though.
Firefox supported FTP until a few months ago. Not sure which version though, but it is fresh in memory: I had some such URLs in my history that couldn't be displayed anymore
In the earlier days of the web, it was not totally uncommon to see people hosting their home pages on an FTP server rather than an HTTP server. Netscape and IE both spoke FTP just fine, and for some people, access to an FTP account was more convenient than paying for separate web hosting. Or settling for GeoCities. If the page had a lot of images, it was quite a bit slower than HTTP though.