Mozilla has finally removed all the in-built support for FTP links starting from the version 90 of the Firefox web browser. Now you cannot access any FTP servers or FTP links from using the Firefox browser. If you try to access an FTP server in Firefox, it will ask you to choose an external FTP client software.
We can easily set WinSCP as the default FTP application that can be used from Firefox. After this whenever you click on FTP links in Firefox, they will be opened in WinSCP instead. WinSCP is a very popular, open-source FTP client software. It is highly recommended for use with Firefox web browser if you must open the FTP links.
Here is how you can set and use WinSCP as FTP client for Firefox web browser:
- Download portable version of WinSCP from https://winscp.net/eng/downloads.php.
- Extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP file to an easily accessible folder on your hard drive such as D:\WinSCP.
- Launch Firefox, and enter ftp://ftp.vim.org in the address bar (or just click on this link). It will ask you to choose an FTP client application. Click on the Choose button and select WinSCP.exe from the folder we extracted it to in step 2.
- Select the checkbox Always use this application to open ftp links and then click on Open Link.
- The ftp://ftp.vim.org link will now open in WinSCP (it is anonymous server). From now on all the FTP links that you click on in Firefox browser will be opened automatically in WinSCP.
Instead of using a portable version of WinSCP, you can also install it on your Windows PC. But it is much easier to select the WinSCP executable from a portable folder location. You can try opening any ftp link instead of entering ftp://ftp.vim.org in the browser. This is FTP server for the popular VIM editor.
WinSCP does not seem to recognize sites that allow anonymous login. In my case there are a number of government sites I can no longer access.