Trying to connect to my FTP server from my browser does a search instead of taking me to the directory. Same link works in Firefox but not on others

I have a ftp server ftp://192.168.1.6:2121/ which I want to connect to using my browser but instead it does a search on duckduckgo. The same link works in firefox but all the other browsers fail. I use brave and opera and both did a search using the search engine instead of actially taking me to the directory.

Am I doing it wrong or can it be a bug that I should report?

This is on brave

And this is on firefox

As you can see brave automatically tries to search it using the search engine but firefox looks up the web using the ftp.

Also tried chromium and faced the same results that I did with brave and opera.

FTP is bring deprecated. But for now, there is still a flag to enable it.

1. On the address bar, type: chrome://flags.
2. Search for #enable-ftp.
3. Enable it, and restart the browser.

Note that the flag might be removed in future releases of the browser.

Most browsers are today moving away from supporting the ftp protocol.

This is for the same reason of security as that of the move away from the http protocol to https.

While there exists an ftps protocol, the implementations currently incorporated in most browsers do not support it.

For example, see the Chrome/Chromium article Deprecate and remove support for FTP URLs:

The current FTP implementation in Google Chrome has no support for encrypted connections (FTPS), nor proxies. Usage of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.

Google Chrome 72+ removed support for fetching document subresources over FTP and rendering of top level FTP resources. Currently navigating to FTP URLs result in showing a directory listing or a download depending on the type of resource. A bug in Google Chrome 74+ resulted in dropping support for accessing FTP URLs over HTTP proxies. Proxy support for FTP was removed entirely in Google Chrome 76.

Remaining capabilities of Google Chrome’s FTP implementation are restricted to either displaying a directory listing or downloading a resource over unencrypted connections. We would like to deprecate and remove this remaining functionality rather than maintain an insecure FTP implementation.

Although Firefox still supports ftp, I would think that it would also adopt this policy in the future. You might still be able to find browser extensions to support it, but it would be better and more lasting to use a utility for accessing ftp.

The enable-ftp flag (and thus entire FTP protocol support) has been completely disabled and descoped as of Chrome 91 and Edge 91.

Right now (August 2021) you still have a chance too access FTP addresses in Chrome / Edge (details below), but I expect that my answer will become outdated in next couple of months just as it took only two months for Reddy Lutonadio's answer to become outdated.

To be able to access FTP sites in Chrome 92 (and newer?) or Edge 92 (and newer?) follow these steps.

1. On the Chrome's address bar type: chrome://flags (or edge://flags in Microsoft Edge)
2. Type or paste M91 in search bar
3. Change value of Temporarily unexpire M91 flags flag from Default to Enabled
4. Click Relaunch (Chrome) / Restart (Edge) in the right-bottom corner
5. Type or paste ftp in search bar
6. Change value of Enable support for FTP URLs flag from Default to Enabled
7. Click Relaunch (Chrome) / Restart (Edge) in the right-bottom corner

Similarly to Reddy Lutonadio's answer above, I expect the Temporarily unexpire M91 flags flag to be removed in future releases of both browsers, thus making FTP protocol not available in Chrome / Edge for good.