FTP doesn't work under Mavericks with Chrome or Firefox with the latest Sophos AV for Mac

Question

I have been trying to find a setting which enables URLs like:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/

in Firefox or Chrome. This has been disabled by Sophos recently, or Sophos in combination with Mavericks. If I uninstall Sophos AV then ftp works as expected.

What happens is that the browser hangs waiting for something.

ftp still works using:

Yummy FTP (third party client)

Command Line Interface in Terminal

Finder

... but using Firefox or Chrome was useful to me.

Any idea why this has happened and whether there is a fix?

This thread was automatically locked due to age.

ruckus · Accepted Answer

Yep, I can recreate this, and on Mountain Lion too. This is a known defect and it's scheduled to be fixed in a future release. Best guess at the moment is possibly Jan/Feb 2014 time - so maybe only a few months away. Workarounds available: Use Safari. Safari seems to allow the ftp connection (it allows you to connect as guest to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/ and then opens a window). Enter the IP address of the ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/ server you're connecting to in the 'Allowed Sites' tab under 'Web Protection' in Preferences. Disable Web Protection until issue is fixed when using this address (i.e., you don't necessarily have to keep it off all of the time when doing other things). You will still benefit from on-access/on-demand scanning when Web Protection is switched off. :1014931