I can see where you're coming from - having a browser support all these protocols seems like poor design. Let everything do what they're good at, and all that. But usability suffers when users need to install and open different applications for every protocol they want to use. I think it might be good if there was some robust way to provide low-level browser extensions (that would probably be loaded in as shared objects).
That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.
That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.