Chrome Update Removes Flash / FTP and On January 19th of this year, Google released a new Chrome version–Chrome 88. The most notable part of this release is the removal of the Adobe Flash Player and FTP features.
FTP Removal
Google Chrome Update removes support for FTP in the because usage is significantly low, and it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client.
However, the removal wasn’t abrupt. Google had previously removed support for fetching document sub-resources over FTP and rendering top-level FTP resources in Google Chrome 72 and later versions. A bug in Google Chrome 74 and later versions resulted in dropping support for accessing FTP URLs over HTTP proxies. In Google Chrome 76, there was the removal of proxy support entirely. The restriction of the abilities of Google Chrome’s FTP implementation to either displaying a directory listing or downloading over unencrypted connections.
In Chrome 77, disabling of FTP support by default for 50 percent percent of users but was available with flags. In Google Chrome 76, Google Chrome’s FTP implementation abilities restrict either displaying a directory listing or downloading over unencrypted connections. Upon releasing the Chrome 88 version, Google stated that: “All FTP support is disabled. The legacy FTP implementation in Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies.”
Flash Removal
Chrome Update Removes Flash Players. Google Chrome didn’t terminate the use of Flash Players without any reason. At a conference in 2018, the Director Of Engineering at Google, Parisa Tabriz, said that the percentage of daily Chrome users who have loaded at least one page containing Flash Player content per day went down from 80 percent in 2014 under 8 percent in early 2018. This number has continued to plummet since.
In 2011, at the prime of Flash Players, W3Techs, the web technology survey site, recorded that 28.5 percent of all websites at the time uses Flash code. However, currently in January 2021, the figure has plummeted to 2.2 percent. From this data, it is clear that Flash’s era is over, and users won’t miss it as its discontinuation is justified.
Flash Player initially reached the end of its life (EoL) when Adobe started blocking content from playing with Flash on January 12th, 2021. Before this, Adobe had stopped supporting the software officially on December 31st, 2020. Adobe led the decision to end Flash, and it was agreeable with browser makers such as Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, since 2017. Currently, Google, Mozilla, and Apple have stopped supporting Flash Player. The only browser maker that is yet to stop supporting Flash Player is Microsoft. Microsoft is scheduling to stop supporting the Flash Player later this month (January 2021).
In addition to Flash and FTP removal, additional features added to Chrome include its new ability to block mixed, insecure downloads, and it also supports extensions built with Manifest v3 extension rules.
