Communications programs

A GNU program, to transfer files by FTP with professional qualities and totally free.

Many times we find free distribution and open source programs that surprise us with their powerful capabilities and save us, incidentally, the financial outlay of acquiring commercial software to perform the same task.

The case that concerns us in this article is an FTP program called FileZilla that covers a work area in which we all have to participate from time to time: transferring the files of our pages to the server, a procedure in which the FTP protocol is used, which stands for File Transfer Protocol, in case anyone didn’t know.

Program Features

The program is developed for the Windows platform, valid for all versions, from Windows 95 to XP. As they comment on the product page, it is designed to support maximum functionality, always taking care of speed and ensuring a stable environment.

Among the main features, it is worth highlighting the support of the Spanish language during the execution of the program, but not the installer, where this possibility is not offered. It also has the features of the best FTP software:

• Ability to continue broken downloads
• FTP site manager tool
• Ability to keep the connection to the FTP server alive
• Support for working together with firewalls
• SOCKS4/5 and HTTP1.1 support
• Secure SSL and SFTP connections
• Queue of uploads and downloads
• Support for Drag & Drop (Drag and drop)
• Possibility of working with multiple connections

Our opinion

The first impression that the program has given us is that it is extremely fast and handles the connections that are a pleasure to upload the files as quickly as possible. We can always configure if we want it to use multiple connections or not, which gives us the possibility to choose the best method.

The second detail that we have found is an interface very similar to that of other programs, even improved from the classic Cute FTP one. Interface settings and visible windows can be quickly adjusted with the menu bar, giving it versatility for different environments and different user habits. In any case, I don’t think the interface is its forte, since some part of it shows that it needs some improvement in its usability.

The investigation has reached its most positive point when we have accessed the options menu. The number of parameters that we can configure in FileZilla is very high, even with options unknown to us in this type of program. Many of the options, to be honest, will be useful for advanced users, but others are sure to be well understood, such as defining the bandwidth limit for file downloads or uploads.

It is also worth mentioning the installer program, which allows us to choose the features to install -a typical installation takes about 5 megabytes- and choose the work modes that best suit our work. Among them we can highlight the possibility of running in safe mode, without saving passwords and the possibility of saving configurations for one or more different users.

conclusion

Since the alpha version of the program appeared in 2001, this project has found a very promising result. Undoubtedly, it is a fairly limited development time, so we must congratulate the community that created it and congratulate ourselves for being able to enjoy the best advantages and without breaking the bank.