It really isn't as convenient if you have to download lots of files at one time though. FTP has mget. That's probably why FTP lives on for scientific data (NCBI, ENSEMBL, etc). Yes, you could use some tool like wget or curl to spider through a bunch of http links, but that's more work.
Not quite, ftp CLIENTS have mget. The ftp protocol has absolutely no awareness of mget. In fact, ftp is terrible at downloading more than one file at a time because it has no concept of pipelining and keepalive, both things that http supports.
With a nice multi protocol client like lftp, http directory indexes work just like an ftp server:
lftp has a ton of features. background jobs, tab completion, caching of directory contents, multiple connections, parallel fetching of a SINGLE file using multiple connections.
Yes, it looks like '/usr/bin/ftp' from 1970, but it's far far far more advanced than that.
(where 'x' is an asterisk, but HN's formatting eats it)
More work, in the sense that it's more command line options to remember, I agree, but otherwise it's easier to integrate in scripts and much more flexible than mget.
(I don't miss FTP for the sysadmin side of maintaining those servers.)
