For those of you who may not be familiar with FTP, it is important to understand what FTP is, what it does, and what sorts of tools you need to use it.
There are many tools that can handle FTP in one form or another, but not all are created equal for our purposes. These can be broadly categorized as:
Web Browsers: Although most web browsers can handle FTP, they generally only handle it in a single direction (remote files to local computer) and they cannot handle the reverse (local files to remote computer) or do not handle it well. It is not recommended that you use a web browser to handle FTP to or from your website.
HTML/Website Editing Programs: If you use any sort of website editor that runs off of your computer (like Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Nvu, and so on), it most likely has the ability to upload, download, and synchronize files via FTP. The focus of these sorts of programs is to create web content and the ability to FTP files to your web hosting...