I know my perspective is really skewed, but don't filezilla and the like make ~FTP easy enough? Or failing that, even Windows must have the hooks to (implement an add-on to) mount SFTP and treat it like a thumb drive? Why is it harder to use FTP/SFTP than a fancy web frontend?
Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.
“What’s a filezilla?”
“go here, drop files there” instead of “download this, put this here, connect, drop your files here” makes the difference between people using your service and not using your service.
> Because a lot of people nowadays just use a browser. That’s 99% of what a computer is to them.
Doesn't mean they could not learn that it is not. I think that developers underestimating users is a problem. "They are too dumb to run a desktop app, so let's put everything in the browser" is a weak argument to me.
This is less true of software like the one mentioned in the article that are intended to be self-hosted, though: I have to walk my users through using it anyways and so I can show them FileZilla or install a SFTP filesystem on their computer or setup syncthing/dropbox for them to handle uploads. There’s lots of ways to avoid exposing a custom file upload service for this sort of thing.
