My friend once mentioned that FTP would be a good option, I'm not sure why though. I think they regarded HTTP as superfluous for the purpose of what we use the web for.
It's not just firewalls. The fact that (unencrypted) FTP is still widely used today when better alternatives like SFTP (via SSH) have existed for years strikes me as odd.
(I'm speaking about authenticated connections. For anonymous access - which should be read-only anyway - you're usually better off using HTTP anyway)
I once had to provide an FTP-like interface to user directories for the website's users. Couldn't find an easy way to do it with SFTP without creating Linux users. Found an FTPS daemon that would let me call an external script for auth and set a root directory, which made it trivial (once I deciphered its slightly-cryptic docs).
So in that case, at least, I was very glad FTP(S) was still around.
HTTP tends to be faster for what we use the web for: [0]
FTP does have some advantages, but HTTP has more advanced support for resuming connections, virtual hosting, better compression, and persistent connections, to name a few.
I bet if we had used FTP instead of HTTP for serving HTML right from the start, FTP would today have all of the same extensions and the same people would argue for it being too bloated :) (HTTP started as pretty minimalistic protocol back in the day)
I often find the discrepancy between what HTTP has originally been designed for (serving static HTML pages) and all the different things it's being used for today highly amusing. Yes, some of todays applications for HTTP border on abuse, but its versatility (combined with its simplicity) fascinates me.
No, because FTP is stateful, thus it sould not have scaled well to many HTTP usecases of today, and something alse would have been born probably, to solve the problems with statelessness, which can be solved by statelessness.
The two success factors of http are statelessness and fixed verbs.
HTTP is quite a good protocol. Simple, extensible to a sane extent, but not overly extensible (XMPP i'm thinking about you).
HTTP is not accidentally successful. FTP is a bad joke. (stateful. binary mode, 7 bit by default. uses multiple connections (unless in passive mode))
