Mozilla is halting support for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) links with the release of Firefox 88. The developers had announced plans to remove the built-in FTP implementation from the browser last year. However, the plan was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. In a new blog post, Mozilla now confirms that the implementation is currently disabled in the Firefox Nightly and Beta pre-release channels and will be disabled for all users with the release of Firefox 88 on April 19. Once the implementation is disabled, Firefox will pass on ftp:// links to external applications.

Further, there are plans to completely remove the FTP implementation with Firefox 90, which is expected to be released in June. The new change is expected to affect the Android version of the browser as well. Notably, Google Chrome had removed support for FTP URLs back in January 2021.

"Most places where an extension may pass 'ftp' such as filters for proxy or webRequest should not result in an error, but the APIs will no longer handle requests of those types. To help offset this removal, ftp has been added to the list of supported protocol_handlers for browser extensions. This means that extensions will be able to prompt users to launch an FTP application to handle certain links," Mozilla add-ons community manager Caitlin Neiman wrote in a blog post.

Firefox 88 for Android has apparently been released a few days before schedule, as reported by Android Police. During the launch of Firefox 88 beta, the release notes mentioned that the new update would fix the issue where video playback in fullscreen or picture-in-picture mode would not display correctly on sites using a desktop viewport, specifically on Firefox for Android. Firefox 88 is also expected to move the Take a Screenshot feature from the Page Actions menu in the URL bar into a regular icon which users can add to the toolbar from the customize menu.