I think there's something that many people don't know when they compare FTP support in Mac OS X with FTP support in Windows XP.
Mac OS X really mounts the FTP volume, just like it mounts HFS+, FAT volumes etc. This means you can navigate to the mounted FTP volume from every application, including the Terminal. You can also open Word, e.g. and open a .doc file directly from the FTP server. Word doesn't notice at all that the file is not on a local disk and Microsoft didn't have to develop any extra code for this to work.
If Apple now enabled write support, there would be many problems. Imagine, e.g., a database application. When someone changes a record in an open database file, the application writes the changes to disk by overwriting a small part of the database file (where that record is located) with the new version. Now imagine what would happen if some user had opened that database directly from a FTP server. As noted before, the database application would not notice that. When the application now overwrites something in the middle of the file, Mac OS X can't simply tell the FTP server to overwrite that part of the file, because there's no FTP command to do that. You can only upload a complete file. So Mac OS X would have to download the entire file to a temporary location, then overwrite that small part of the file, then upload the entire file again. This would have to be done for every bit the database application wants to change in the file. Hardly possible. With the current implementation (read-only) Mac OS X can simply tell the database application that writing the changes is not possible because the file is read-only. That's something every application understands.
Microsoft has chosen a completely different approach. They have full read/write support for FTP in their Windows Explorer, but the Explorer just makes the FTP windows look like standard folder windows. In reality, it's a completely different implementation. If you open Word or the command line and try to navigate to a FTP folder that's open in the Explorer, it won't work. The FTP server is not mounted - no application other than the Explorer can access it. It's just like opening a FTP share with Transmit on the Mac - you have full read/write support in Transmit, but all other applications cannot access the files. (If you choose to edit a file, Transmit has do download it to a temporary location on the local disk, open it with an application, and everytime the application saves changes, Transmit uploads the file again.)
So to summarize it:
- Mac OS X really mounts the FTP volumes just like any other type of disk. It works transparently with all applications, but it will never have write support because of the problems described above.
- Windows Explorer has some kind of separate FTP application like Transmit with full read/write support built-in. It just shares the look and feel with other Explorer windows, so as long as you only use the Explorer, you don't notice that you're really using an FTP application. But this solution doesn't allow any other application (that doesn't have its own FTP client) to access files directly from the FTP folder.
I personally believe the Windows way is superior, because most people never want to access files directly from an FTP server. They just want to download and upload them. And in that respect, Windows clearly outclasses Mac OS X.
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