This week on Open Source Spotlight, I’d like to talk about a program that gets downloaded more than 6000 times a day, and that’s just from its official mirror. This program’s website has more than 20,000 pageviews (that’s pageviews, not hits) everyday. And this program is the recommended program in its field by major universities around the globe. The program is FileZilla, and its field is FTP client.
Started as a school project 3 years ago, FileZilla has grown to be one of the most well-known and respected File Transfer Protocol programs available anywhere – and with good reason. FileZilla is a fast, powerful, feature-rich FTP/SFTP client and server that gets the job done, and, as always on OSS, it’s free. Free of cost or obligation, and free of ads, spyware, or appeals to upgrade to the “professional” version. FileZilla’s many features include a site manager to store users’ connection details and logins. Its Windows Explorer style interface, complete with drag & drop file movement makes the program very user-friendly for anyone who has used Windows for more than 5 minutes. The window shows both the user’s computer and the contents of the folder FileZilla is connected to. Transferring files is as easy as grabbing it from one frame and moving it to the other.
FileZilla even overcomes the potentially confusing terms “Upload” and “Download” by adding an easy to understand arrow, letting the user know which way the file is going. But the “look and feel” isn’t the only thing that makes FileZilla a breeze to use. It has an upload and download queue system that allows users to “stack up” a bunch of transfers in a row, and just let it run until they’ve all gone through.
For users with dial-up connections to the internet, or users who deal with very large files, FileZilla’s support for pausing and resuming uploads/downloads can be a life-saver. This option only works when connecting to servers that support it, but most newer servers do.
FileZilla’s “Keep Alive System” is also very important if either the user’s connection or the server’s connection is at all unstable. If this feature wasn’t available many hours of reloading files because of a minor connection failure would have been wasted. The Timeout detector also helps a bunch with buggy connections.
Let’s talk security, FileZilla is loaded with it! Support for SFTP is a must since information crime is at an all time high. And for those users, (and all users should be in this list, especially since XP Service Pack 2 is out), with a Firewall, FileZilla can still be used as both a FTP Client and Server, and works great with current security features.
FileZilla is also at home with SSL secured connections and has SOCKS4/5 and HTTP 1.1 Proxy support.
FileZilla also offers GSS authentication and encryption. However a second program, Kerberos, is required for that functionality. Anyone can grab a copy of Kerberos here.
FileZilla is perfect for beginners and advance users. It supports custom commands and standard FTP controls. The interface can also be customized to meet individual needs or preferences. As good as the current release is FileZilla is constantly being improved. FileZilla 3 is due out soon, and it will be cross-platform, so Linux users will be able to benefit from FileZilla without using a Windows emulator. For more info on FileZilla 3, check out the “Developer’s Diary”. Here
FileZilla is a wonderful solution for anyone who needs to get files from one computer to another quickly, safety, and securely. FileZilla is available in a number of languages and works on any edition of Windows since 95.
More information, including support options and download mirrors, can be found on the FileZilla website: Here
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