FileZilla was started as a computer science class project in the second week of January 2001 by Tim Kosse and two classmates.[3][who?

It also allows the preservation of timestamps on transferred files, provided there is support from the local system when downloading or from the target server when uploading.

Other features include configurable transfer speed limits, filename filters, a network configuration wizard, remote file editing, keep-alive command to prevent disconnections when idle, HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-Proxy support, and logging events to a file for debugging.

FileZilla Client is a cross-platform software, runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X, and available in 47 languages worldwide, including Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Nepali, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

"[10] Writing for Ars Technica in August 2008 Emil Protalinski said: "this week's free, third-party application recommendation is FileZilla....

"[11] GoDaddy, Clarion University of Pennsylvania and National Capital FreeNet recommend FileZilla for uploading files to their web hosting services.

[12][13][14] FileZilla is available in the repositories of many Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Trisquel and Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.

[20] Since the project's participation in SourceForge's program to create revenue by adware, several reviewers started warning about downloading FileZilla and discouraged users from using it.

Among the reported effects are: web browser being hijacked, with content, start page and search engines being forcibly changed, popup windows, privacy or spying issues, sudden shutdown and restart events possibly leading to loss of current work.

Also, users reported adware programs to download and install more unwanted software, some causing alerts by security suites, for being malware.

[25] Until version 3.26 FileZilla stored all saved usernames and passwords as plain text, allowing any malware that had gained even limited access to the user's system to read the data.