Using FTP in Firefox 3 Print

To start this article off, I'd like to first note that we DO NOT suggest using FireFox or any web browser for connecting to FTP. Simply put, web browsers are for browsing the web. Your refrigerator would cool your house if you left the door open, but it's not intended for that purpose. Similarly, browsers are not intended to function as an FTP client and, while they do support some FTP-like features, they are very limited in their FTP functionality.

Having said that, we will describe what FTP functionality Firefox 3 does provide and how to extend Firefox's capabilities to more closely resemble those of a full-fledged FTP client.

Upon opening Firefox 3, you will need to visit the following link to access your site via FTP:

ftp://[email protected]

where 'username' is your cPanel username and 'yourdomain.com' is your domain name. Upon visiting this link, you will be prompted with a password dialog stating "Enter password for username on ftp://yourdomain.com". Enter your cPanel password. After authenticating, you will see a list of your files within your root directory. Thanks to Firefox's Download Manager, you can click on any of these files and download them to your local machine. To browse within any folder simply double click on any folder name.

That about covers what you can do with FTP in FF3. You can't upload files and, in my experience, even navigating can sometimes be buggy.

If you want to get the most out of Firefox and continue to use it for FTP, we recommend using the FireFTP plugin. You can download this plugin here:

FireFTP Firefox Add-on

This plugin will extend the capabilities of Firefox and allow it to perform FTP-related tasks. If you need help with using FireFTP, please be sure to view our video demos on FireFTP:

FireFTP - Configuration
FireFTP - Uploading/Downloading