If 10 or 15 years ago we had said that Flash and FTP were going to disappear completely from the Internet, they would have taken us for crazy. Nothing is further from reality, security has prevailed, and this year we have already said goodbye to Adobe Flash Player , and from this week we can also say it to FTP .
Adobe Flash Player was officially discontinued on the Adobe website on January 1, 2021 . The company stopped supporting it because it was a real nightmare to patch all the vulnerabilities that they found in it every month. In addition, its consumption of resources was very high, and therefore it was better to opt for alternatives such as HTML5, as web pages and content optimized for mobile phones have been doing for a decade.
Flash died for the good of all technology
Its end has been celebrated by practically the entire industry, and some projects like Flash Game Archive are dedicated to collecting games based on this technology so that they are not lost. Many websites that used Flash no longer work, and Google encouraged the use of alternatives such as HTML5, enhancing their positioning in the search engine if the websites loaded before and had resources that took up less.
Thus, since the beginning of the year, all browsers have eliminated Flash , and in fact it cannot even be activated manually when we enter a page, since all the code is eliminated. If you still need to access Flash-based content or apps, there are browsers like Pale Moon that still allow you to install Flash.
FTP dies in July 2021
In the case of the FTP protocol, this protocol has been used for decades to transfer files. However, in recent years, with the advancement of HTTPS, its use is highly insecure because all transferred data is in plain text. With this, any attacker can steal, modify or falsify that information when downloading it. In fact, there are many malware campaigns aimed at compromising FTP servers and modifying files for users to download malware.
For this reason, web browsers decided to eliminate support, and last week it was Mozilla who, since Firefox 90 , no longer supports connections to FTP . This function was disabled by default since Firefox 88, and is now directly eliminated and cannot be used. Google Chrome also did the same in December with Chrome 88 .
Just as HTTPS is the best alternative to HTTP, with FTP was created SFTP , based on SSH . Thanks to it, all the connections we make with a server are fully encrypted and authenticated, protecting our connections and all the downloads we make. To authenticate, it is possible to use a username or password, as well as a public key.
According to data provided by Google, the use of FTP in the browser was so low that it was no longer feasible to continue working on Chrome working as a client for FTP. Thanks to this, anyone who now tries to attack our browsers using FTP will no longer be able to do so.
