The always-excellent Blogzilla, a blog about Mozilla, mentions a free, open FTP client that hooks into Firefox: fireFTP. It sounds OK. In fact, after reading some of the comments for the blog entry, OK is pretty much accurate. I mean, it sounds cool to check out, but it also sounds like a lot of features are missing at this point. I hope the developers keep working on it so that one day I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
In the meantime, if you need a good, free, open source FTP client for Windows, you should hie thee over to FileZilla & download it. It's good - real good. Most importantly, it does SFTP, which is all that I'll use (FTP ain't safe).
If you're using Linux, heck, just use Konqueror … or gFTP if you don't do KDE. Mac OS X? Well, lots of Mac FTP clients ain't open source, & they cost money, but it looks like Cyberduck is both open source & free. If you check it out, let us know.
1. I've tried many non-free, closed source FTP clients for Windows and none are as good as FileZilla. Each had problems connecting to one or more sites, or were just overly cumbersome. FileZilla is the only FTP program for Windows that I've found which will connect to every site I try.
Of course it's easier at home where I have Linux and a variety of great choices, and that's one great thing about open source and Linux. But that's a discussion for another time...
Posted at 6:34AM on Dec 19th 2005 by mattschwartz