Although you can use dedicated FTP clients such as CuteFTP, WS_FTP, FileZilla and others, some sites still allow you to connect to FTP servers using your browser. Even for those scenarios where FTP is allowed, It's strongly recommended using a dedicated FTP client as it's more secure, in general.
Different FTP Connection Types
Each organization determines how they wish users to connect to their FTP server. There are three basic ways:
- Anonymous FTP access – this is the easiest connection method. You do not need to include any user information. One popular example is Adobe. Here you can download different versions of free popular applications.
- User name required – in this instance the organization wants you to have an account to access the site. Schools tend to use this type of access.
- Username + password – this is the most restrictive as the user has to have an account and password to gain access to the site. Many companies use this method for people to upload large files to the server.
Regardless of your connection type, you can use your web browser to gain access in most situations.
Browser access ca be disabled server side.
For example, ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/
if no anonymous login is allowed, you will get prompted for user and password.
you can skip that step by using this structure in the URL:
ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com
SFTP and FTP are two completely different and incompatible protocols. Do not mix those two. ( sftp runs on top of the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol and by default uses port number 22 for communications.a custom ssh port can be defined)
No major web browser supports SFTP (at least not without any addon), so for this protocol you will need to use an FTP client.
