alt Hacker News> I don't think they needed improving in order to continue accessing the existing sites that still used them
The browser support would have need continous security fixes and rewrites unfortunately, the protocol specs and the code was written in the day and age of a much less adversarial internet. It's much safer to handle those sort of protocols with a HTTPS proxy on the front these days. There's dedicated gopher and ftp clients still out there, IMHO browsers are too big and bloated as they are they need more stuff taken out of them, not more added without taking anything away, particularly stuff thats old and insecure and not used much anymore.
And yes, I'm also here for the retro factor :-) my pet project is Z80/6502 emulation in UnrealEngine with VT100 and VGA support and running BBS's in space. So I'm all over stuff about old ANSI, PETSCII and anything even tangentially 8x8 character set related:
I think it had been many years since the FTP code had needed a security fix, and at least a year or two for the Gopher code.
The entire original point of the WWW project was, approximately, providing a better user interface for accessing files on FTP servers. So to me it seems perverse that the current stewards of the Web have broken that.