I still haven’t re-installed FireFTP, since I’m still happy with Filezilla when I need ftp, but I can report that on the new Vista machine we have in our office, Firefox has been the least of our problems. I’m running 2.0.0.5 with different extensions for different users, and so far it’s been running rock-solid.

Thought I’d better set the record straight for anyone who saw the earlier posts.

There are some great commercial products out there, such as WS_FTP Home and WS_FTP Pro. In fact, so far as I know, these are the gold standards for ftp client software. I’ve used them both and highly recommend them to anyone who has $39.95 or $54.95, respectively, to shell out. What’s more, Ipswitch will give you 30 days each to try them out before you buy, so you have nothing to lose.

But personally, with four websites underway, I’m running on a shoestring until at least one of them starts turning a profit!

Even if you’re happy using FireFTP as I was until recently, Filezilla is definitely worth the effort to download if you’re not going with one of Ipswitch, Inc.’s premium products mentioned above. The interface is slightly different from FireFTP’s–primarily that it’s drag-and-drop rather than select file(s) and push a button–but it only took me a couple of minutes to figure all that out and get going with it.

The thing I like best about it, I guess, is the fact that it’s a standalone program, so aside from it not bringing down my entire browser and any pending emails should it crash, the interface just feels roomier. I always have so many tabs open in FireFox and so many toolbars active that FireFTP feels like it’s crammed in and lacks adequate space compared to Filezilla. (Of course, I originally went with FireFTP so that I wouldn’t need to run yet another standalone program–don’t think I haven’t recognized the irony of that yet.)

The Ipswitch products are faster and have more features, but I think I’m going to be using Filezilla for a while now as my primary ftp client. Sometimes second best is good enough.

filezilla
FireFTP

Until recently.

I don’t know if the problem is that my Firefox installation has become bloated with all the new stuff I’ve downloaded for clipping and bookmarking (especially the so-called “social bookmarking”) and this is interfering with FireFTP’s operation, or what. (I seem to have a congenital inability to visit the Forefox Addons page without downloading something.)

All I know is that lately, FireFTP has been behaving strangely. It often doesn’t load cleanly and needs to be loaded more than once (separate tabs).

When I then attempt to close the now-useless perpetually loading tab, Firefox tends to crash. In fact, the crashing is quite reliable(!). Having lost a lot of partially finished emails and that sort of thing, I’m now in the process of installing Filezilla to see what that has to offer. I like the convenience of FireFTP, but want to try isolating the problems.

Has anyone else had similar difficulties with FireFTP?

FireFTP