

While most people today use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, your version of these browsers may not offer out of the box support for FTP. One of the easiest ways to download files from an FTP site is using your web browser. A web browser can additionally serve as an FTP client. There are stand-alone FTP clients written explicitly for this purpose, or FTP may be packed into another piece of software, like a web-editing tool, which utilizes FTP to transfer files to the webserver. Many giant organizations such as Microsoft and the Internal Revenue Service use FTP sites to distribute software, documents, and other files.Īn FTP server stores files, and software known as an FTP client is utilized to connect to the server to upload or download files. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol," which is a long-established way that permits file transfers over the Internet. FTP sites have been around long before "the cloud," and Dropbox became household terms.
