Comment by rsync
11 years ago
Do you have any insight into why SFTP support was never built into "connect to server" ?
It seems so simple and obvious ... would have saved humanity millions of man hours with people mucking around with sshFS/FUSE on their macs, which barely worked back then ...
No insight whatsoever. Probably nobody ever asked for it, to be honest. "Connect to Server ..." was overwhelmingly used to connect via AFP or, shudder NFS at the time, both of which expose a filesystem like interface. How much like a filesystem is a SFTP connection, as opposed to a FTP-like one? That's probably the reason, right there: WebDAV purported to expose filesystem semantics, which meant that in theory adding it was simply defining a communications protocol to the Finder, rather than a complete translation layer between filesystem operations and FTP ones.
SFTP is closer to NFS than FTP.