[Kevin]

Originally Posted by pat++

This is the most stupid comment in this thread, and you managed to post it twice. Congratulations. Why providing a read-only ftp client makes OS X more secure than windows?

Because tying such a thing into the OS is insecure.

FTP isn't that secure.

MS doesn't care.

It's the same stupidity that had them tie the browser to the OS.

That was a WONDERFUL IDEA!

And I repeated it to make a point. This is why MS has tons of security issues.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by pat++

This is the most stupid comment in this thread, and you managed to post it twice. Congratulations. Why providing a read-only ftp client makes OS X more secure than windows?

By discouraging people who don't know what they're doing from making big security mistakes. There are better protocols for what you are doing, and your computers support them. Use them.

You're right about one thing, though; there shouldn't even be read-only FTP support in the Finder. I hope Apple removes it in the future.

[Graymalkin]

Originally Posted by pat++

Who is the hell is going sniff packets behind my firewall between my 2 networked computers?
Do you think POP3 is more secure? No it isn't. And nevertheless Apple is supporting POP3 in Mail... What ??? This is a huge security risk. My mum didn't tell me!

Do you want me to go to your neighbor's house and plug my iBook directly into their cable modem and launch Ethereal? You seem to forget that cable and DSL connections are essentially big LANs. I've caught all manner of things sitting outside my firewall just watching packets fly by. If you're connecting to FTPs I can see it and know your usernames and passwords. Don't think your firewall is protecting your data once it leaves your network.

More to the point, Finder likely lacks write support for FTPs for two reasons: there's better protocols and it helps sell .Mac subscriptions. WebDAV, AFP, and SMB are all much better file sharing protocols for local networks. As has been mentioned a number of times, FTP lacks the sort of support for manipulating files that a file system driver would need to work with the rest of the OS. Say for instance Finder did have write support on FTPs. Sam the graphic designer mounts the local file share via FTP instead of AFP or SMB. She opens a Photoshop file off of the file server and makes some changes. Lunch is coming up so she decides to save and log out on her workstation. She instinctively hits command-S.

All hell breaks loose. For starters the file system driver needs to store a temporary copy of the file locally before uploading it to the server to make the process transparent. That goes fine but there's some heavy network traffic and the upload is a little sluggish. Sam gets up to grab lunch. Halfway through the sluggish save process the server has some issue and the connection resets and the save fails. Sam gets back from lunch and sees the failed save and saves again, this time it goes over without a hitch. Sam just saved over Mike's three hours worth of work on that file. Without any sort of file-level locking Sam and Mike were able to open the same file for editing and were unaware of what the other was doing.

What some of you are arguing is you want Finder to be a full fledged FTP client like Konqueror, Nautilus, and Windows Explorer. You're not wanting an FTP mounted as a mountable file system. Why is this feature needed in Finder? Buy Fetch 5 or FTPeel, both have very Finder-like qualities but are real fully featured FTP clients. The mini-clients inside of Windows Explorer and such are the half-assed clients. Finder supports what a good percentage of FTP users need, downloads. For everything else there's lots of third party programs both shareware and freeware. Complaining about this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I could very well use Terminal for my FTP needs, instead I bought a license for Transmit. If you want to be a cheapskate write an AppleScript FTP droplet, it is ridiculously easy to do.

I agree with Millennium, adding more FTP support in Finder is just going to let people use it for all of the things they really shouldn't. Finder keeps people from treating an FTP server like they might an AFP one just because they'd be able to. While some people might be savvy enough not to use FTP for LAN file sharing there's lots of know-little office managers who aren't and would. Using FTP as a means move files between two systems that aren't necessarily running the same OS is fine, using it in place of a sharing mechanism with file level locking and control is not.

[SMacTech]

Originally Posted by pat++

Thank you so much. Only your very smart mind was able to notice this.... The question was : what is the difference between a read/write Finder and a read/write Transmit client? Answer : none.

Really? It doesn't seem to be the case when reading your comments.
.

Your question was : What is the the difference between having 2 users having access to an FTP with Transmit and 2 users accessing it through the Finder???????????????

Seems like a different question to me.

What part of my comments indicates some lack of knowledge about FTP?

[sniffer]

Originally Posted by waffffffle

The same goes for FTP. The vast majority of web hosting companies today provide ONLY FTP as the means for uploading files. There is no other way to do it. Right now in order to connect to any of my web hosts I need to use a separate program, and configure that program to work with my external editor (and I am limited to ONE editor). If I could do this in the Finder then I could open files in whatever app I want, easily.

Last time I checked Windows didn't let me edit the files directly on external ftp shares, except for changing permissions, uploading, etc, but not editing files in local applications. I think the purpose with the Windows implementation is to give users very basic ftp interaction. I haven't tested this with 10.4s Safari, but I would prefer read/browse-access in web browser like in FireFox instead of local mounting for random downloading from public ftp servers. For the security reasons I agree with the many others that ftp shares should *never* be treated as local shares, and for practical reasons browsers are the best average Jon "ftp browser" for two reasons: 1) FTP is an insecure protocol and should be treated like one (side by side with http in a browser). Here I think MS is doing this right. 2) Only power users know how to access ftp shares in explorer but the norm is that they have dedicated applications for this. The benefit of the system implemented average Jon ftp application vanish by this, and again for security and data-reliability reasons I think Apple is doing it right by not giving users write access to shares.

[pat++]

Originally Posted by Graymalkin

Do you want me to go to your neighbor's house and plug my iBook directly into their cable modem and launch Ethereal? You seem to forget that cable and DSL connections are essentially big LANs. I've caught all manner of things sitting outside my firewall just watching packets fly by. If you're connecting to FTPs I can see it and know your usernames and passwords. Don't think your firewall is protecting your data once it leaves your network.

My data doesn't leave my network when I transfer files between 2 computers at home. The only way for you to actually see the login/pass I use is physically plug your iBook on MY router at home. Come if you wish to, but I doubt any one on earth would be interested in doing this. If the reason why Apple didn't implement read/write FTP in the Finder was security, they wouldn't even have implemented a read-only client, and they wouldn't provide an FTP server either. Now can you please stop with this nonsense about security and read/write FTP in the Finder? Security and the ability for the Finder to write files using FTP is NOT RELATED AT ALL.

The reason why it's probably not implemented as read/write is because it might lack some functionnality to be implemented as a filesystem (file seek for example). If it's the case, then Apple should implement it as a basic FTP client and not expose it as a file system. But the Finder needs to be able to copy files from/to FTP server. This is needed and it's a pain to get an external FTP client just because you want to copy a file. The Finder should be able to handle it like Windows does.

What most people do is :

1- Mount ftp server
2- Copy file from FTP server to local disk
3- Edit file & Save locally
4- Copy the file back on the server -> Does not work because this crappy Finder is read-only. This is frustating, and a lot of people do not understand why they don't have permission.

More to the point, Finder likely lacks write support for FTPs for two reasons: there's better protocols and it helps sell .Mac subscriptions. WebDAV, AFP, and SMB are all much better file sharing protocols for local networks. As has been mentioned a number of times, FTP lacks the sort of support for manipulating files that a file system driver would need to work with the rest of the OS. Say for instance Finder did have write support on FTPs. Sam the graphic designer mounts the local file share via FTP instead of AFP or SMB. She opens a Photoshop file off of the file server and makes some changes. Lunch is coming up so she decides to save and log out on her workstation. She instinctively hits command-S.
[...]

Providing read-only support in the Finder is useless. If they want to limit FTP to read-only, then do it in the web browser and do not mount it like a file system. The Finder is used to manage files, i.e copy/move/delete/create folders on local or remote hosts. If the Finder implements FTP, then it needs to fully support it. People are expecting the same interface to offer the same functionnality.

[waffffffle]

I started this thread six months ago because the situation at the company that I was working at was one were I was trying to roll out more Macs and Finder-like FTP access was essential and budgetary concerns a top priority. The company was mostly Windows and all of the employees had grown accustomed to using FTP via Windows Explorer and didn't understand the concept of an FTP application. On the rare occasion when they needed to use an FTP application because Windows wasn't working with a particular server all hell would break loose because no one understood what was going on.

That being said, I no longer work at that company so I could care less. At my new job I work with mostly OS X and do not have to deal with NTFS, FAT, SMB, FTP or the like. Things work so much more smoothly when everyone has a Mac. ;-)

That being said, I still think that since there are still a lot of people out there who rely on FTP and NTFS, something should be done to help them. I no longer need to advocate for that so I can now keep my mouth shut.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by waffffffle

That being said, I no longer work at that company so I could care less.

So it is possible for you to care less?

[mhuie]

Originally Posted by waffffffle

I started this thread six months ago because the situation at the company that I was working at was one were I was trying to roll out more Macs and Finder-like FTP access was essential and budgetary concerns a top priority. The company was mostly Windows and all of the employees had grown accustomed to using FTP via Windows Explorer and didn't understand the concept of an FTP application. On the rare occasion when they needed to use an FTP application because Windows wasn't working with a particular server all hell would break loose because no one understood what was going on.

That being said, I no longer work at that company so I could care less. At my new job I work with mostly OS X and do not have to deal with NTFS, FAT, SMB, FTP or the like. Things work so much more smoothly when everyone has a Mac. ;-)

That being said, I still think that since there are still a lot of people out there who rely on FTP and NTFS, something should be done to help them. I no longer need to advocate for that so I can now keep my mouth shut.

Just because people are ignorant about FTP means that Apple should implement it? I've been using windows for years, and never use the FTP built into explorer. First it's slow, unstable a transferring multiple files, unstable at transfer for long periods of time and times out easily. It has a terrible method of reporting errors.

If I need to transfer a file or two, I use the command line ftp. There is a reason why you should use an FTP app or command line, because you get responses from the server that you generally need to read.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by pat++

My data doesn't leave my network when I transfer files between 2 computers at home. The only way for you to actually see the login/pass I use is physically plug your iBook on MY router at home. Come if you wish to, but I doubt any one on earth would be interested in doing this. If the reason why Apple didn't implement read/write FTP in the Finder was security, they wouldn't even have implemented a read-only client, and they wouldn't provide an FTP server either. Now can you please stop with this nonsense about security and read/write FTP in the Finder? Security and the ability for the Finder to write files using FTP is NOT RELATED AT ALL.

The reason why it's probably not implemented as read/write is because it might lack some functionnality to be implemented as a filesystem (file seek for example). If it's the case, then Apple should implement it as a basic FTP client and not expose it as a file system. But the Finder needs to be able to copy files from/to FTP server. This is needed and it's a pain to get an external FTP client just because you want to copy a file. The Finder should be able to handle it like Windows does.

What most people do is :

1- Mount ftp server
2- Copy file from FTP server to local disk
3- Edit file & Save locally
4- Copy the file back on the server -> Does not work because this crappy Finder is read-only. This is frustating, and a lot of people do not understand why they don't have permission.

Providing read-only support in the Finder is useless. If they want to limit FTP to read-only, then do it in the web browser and do not mount it like a file system. The Finder is used to manage files, i.e copy/move/delete/create folders on local or remote hosts. If the Finder implements FTP, then it needs to fully support it. People are expecting the same interface to offer the same functionnality.

Apple needs a read-only client for downloads from the internet (and those are usually not password protected, so you have no security issues in the first place). Despite your insistance, ftp shares are not mountable as filesystems neither in Windows nor in MacOS X.

As pointed out earlier, Windows does not mount ftp shares (at least not in the versions of 2k and XP I used recently, as you cannot edit files directly on the server. What some programs do, however, they download the complete file, store it locally, wait until you finished working on it, and then transfer it back. The explorer is, like other browsers, just an ftp client, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe this is not an issue for you in your small home network, but most people who use ftp are uploading files to their http server or so.