
Microsoft Is Killing ePub Support in Edge Classic - ingve
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/213350/microsoft-is-killing-epub-support-in-edge-classic
======
duncanawoods
Oh what? That is really bad. Epub support in edge was the one thing I used and
was impressed by. The text looked great and it supported very good read-aloud
that tracked the words in the text. I was impressed how well it read tricky
things like numbers and sub-clauses. If you switched to one of the British
accents, crank the speed to 2x and it was a great way to power through some
books that might have become a slog. When you begin to tire, switch the gender
of the voice and it suddenly becomes more digestible again.

I just don't know why MS spends so much time shooting itself in it's feet. So
much talent and promising product gets burned for indecipherable reasons.

~~~
mips_avatar
Killing decent products is the Google way. Now that Microsoft is using
chromium maybe the Google way is seeping in.

~~~
userbinator
Invasive telemetry and profiting from ads instead of selling software is
definitely the "Google way" and it's been taking over MS since at least the
beginnings of Windows 10 (remember the forced "free upgrade"?)

~~~
mips_avatar
Do you support telemetry if it makes the product better, and not used for ad
targeting?

~~~
lewisj489
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Telemtery can be a invaluable tool for a
whole bunch of reasons. It should, of course, be optional.

I think only 1 type of telemetry shouldn't ask for permission, a quick,
anonymous ping to say it's been installed.

~~~
tremon
_a quick, anonymous ping_

Sure, but for it to be anonymous it should not contain the sender's IP
address. That probably means an UDP message with nulled source ip, which runs
foul of many ISP's egress filters (and rightly so).

So, realistically speaking, there is no such thing as an anonymous ping. Or am
I missing an obvious solution here?

~~~
jefftk
You could have an aggregation service, run by a trusted independent non-
profit. It could have a strong privacy policy and external auditing.

------
ocdtrekkie
The biggest thing that was exciting to me was EPUB having native OS support,
effectively, via Edge. You could assume an EPUB was readable in Windows
without downloading something, just like you can assume for JPGs and TXT
files. This feels like a huge step back for the format to lose this.

~~~
sitkack
I just realized that EPUB is the CHM of the modern world.

~~~
jacobolus
Does CHM mean
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help)
?

~~~
sitkack
Exactly. The original html based document format.

~~~
interfixus
Which was not a bad format. Even as thorough Linux user with no Windows in
sight, I have often used .chm files for handy, offline documentation. PHP docs
come to mind, back when PHP was something I occasionally did.

~~~
nolok
Text, markup, arborescence, embedded medias, all in a single file, supported
natively by the os and comparable between apps. Before the internet everywhere
there is an entire generation of windows software, especially developer tools,
where chm was the norm for high quality documentation.

~~~
bromuro
Yeah i really appreciated the chm format too. They killed it or is it still
alive?

Mac OS guides are also a very good editorial/digital work. (but no videos?).
The guides on MacOS look very simple and clean. I appreciate when the software
I buy has a guide like that (pixelmator) and not just a link to a website
(sketch). I know the required effort so I value them a lot.

~~~
nolok
It still works just fine but the tools haven’t been updated for a while,
almost no modern software supports exporting to it and it’s not “cool”
anymore. So now we use often inferior stuff instead, or merely get a link to
some online documentation, until someone “reinvents” it five years from now
probably using some kind of electron variant making it cool again.

~~~
Crinus
Hm, almost every desktop program i have on Windows that bothers with help uses
CHM and pretty much every documentation generator can generate CHM files, why
do you think it isn't used?

~~~
nolok
Try to find node, go, vscode etc ... documentation in chm. They have third
parties versions sure, but not official. And for those that still uses it,
it’s rarely up to date.

~~~
Crinus
Of those only VSCode is a desktop application and VSCode is already a web
browser. Also considering it is meant to be modular, its documentation system
would also need to be modular and i'm not sure if CHM is good with that.

------
saagarjha
> “Download an .epub app to keep reading,” a notification in Edge classic
> reads when you load an EPUB document. “Microsoft Edge will no longer be
> supporting [sic] e-books that use the .epub file extension. Visit the
> Microsoft Store to see our recommended .epub apps.”

What’s wrong with this? It looks grammatically correct to me…

~~~
dragonwriter
> What’s wrong with this?

This is answered in the next sentence of the article: _it’s “support” not “be
supporting,” Microsoft_.

The is using the future continuous when the simple future is more appropriate
to the message.

~~~
saagarjha
“Microsoft Edge will no longer be support e-books that use the .epub file
extension” sounds _very_ wrong.

~~~
dragonwriter
“support”, as the author of the article suggests, should replace “be
supporting”, not just “supporting”. The simple future is called for, not the
future continuous.

------
logfromblammo
This makes no sense to me. EPUB is basically HTML in a ZIP container with
mandatory included files. If you already have a full-blown web browser, and a
ZIP library at hand, naively rendering EPUB pages by unzipping to temp files
and tweaking the URI resolver is an easy addition. If you already have a full-
blown web browser that already renders EPUB pages better than a lot of EPUB-
specific reader programs, removing that support is doing work to reduce
functionality.

~~~
sedatk
If it isn't used a lot, I'd prefer the budget to go somewhere more useful
instead.

~~~
snazz
They don’t have to maintain it, they just don’t need to completely get rid of
it. That part is baffling.

~~~
themacguffinman
> They don’t have to maintain it

Yes they do. Rarely used, unmaintained code is a great way to accrue security
vulnerabilities and other bugs.

~~~
logfromblammo
They would still have to maintain it, but they wouldn't need to add features.
If they coded it well enough in the first place, that could be one person
putting in 8 hours a month on the highest-priority issues in the backlog.

EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website
with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the
files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to
chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much
about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an
online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built
in reading order.

I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.

------
WheelsAtLarge
I'm very surprised how bad most ePub readers are. You would think that by now
picking an ePub reader for the PC would be a no brainer but it seems there are
very few good ones. Too bad, the ePub reader is very good. It's the only
reason I use Edge.

~~~
Kaiyou
Same with physical ebook readers, really.

~~~
hollander
How is it bad? What is the problem? The only thing that doesn't work properly
is displaying PDF because many PDFs are setup bad. And sometimes - in epub -
images are too small to display properly. That is something that really can be
improved - image display and handling.

~~~
Kaiyou
Not responsive enough when changing pages. Too much tech crammed in to ramp up
the price of something essentially worth $15. Navigation is unintuitive, it's
hard to get stuff on the device. Not all formats are supported by all readers
and PDF support isn't what it should be. I can't turn pages with either my
left or my right hand, no easy switching beween books and if you've got more
books on there than the average person, like maybe 70, you're already screwed
to find what you want to switch to reading at the moment quickly.

------
runxel
This was literally the only thing Edge was actually good at...

Dammit Microsoft!

~~~
marcosdumay
It's a reasonably good PDF reader too. Because of it Windows got nearly as
good as Linux on that front.

~~~
nolok
Still worth it to replace it with Sumatra right after install though in my
opinion.

------
srikz
They should spin off the old Edge as a reincarnation of Reader from Windows 8.

It was a great app and I hoped it would become as versatile as Preview on Mac.

It was annoying when I double clicked a EPUB (or PDF) it would open the
browser and sometimes all my tabs from last session would open and in most
cases just the EPUB would open and I lose the previous browsing session.

This needs to be a dedicated app separate from the browser. I hope they have
something in the works.

~~~
liability
Does windows have anything analogous to quicklook? That's one feature I think
Apple did well with.. though it's obnoxious it can no longer be extended to
support non-MPEG-LA video formats...

I've experimented with using mpv controlled over json IPC as a FOSS substitute
to quicklook, which works well for media but not documents...

~~~
filmgirlcw
Both QuickLook and Seer do this and both have plugins making it much more akin
to the Quick Look circa Leopard and Snow Leopard. QuickLook is more actively
maintained but both are very good.

[1]: [https://pooi.moe/QuickLook/](https://pooi.moe/QuickLook/) [2]:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/seer-
pro/9pgvfjbvbzwx?acti...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/seer-
pro/9pgvfjbvbzwx?activetab=pivot:overviewtab)

~~~
dgellow
Yep, I recently moved to windows 10 for my personal machine and as looking for
equivalent to macOS features. QuickLook just work, and has even more options
than the version from macOS

------
underwater
Microsoft have a weird habit of releasing niche or experimental products in a
fully fledged form and then not knowing how to make them useful or popular (3D
Paint, anyone?)

Did they really expect a solid ePub reader to be a significant selling point
for the browser?

~~~
worble
>Did they really expect a solid ePub reader to be a significant selling point
for the browser?

Well it was the only reason I ever opened Edge, so it kind of worked?

------
ZuLuuuuuu
I think it was a mistake integrating the browser with an Epub reader. Having
said that, it was still a very nice and elegantly designed part of Edge. So I
would like having it as a stand alone app, but I don't expect MS doing the
right thing. They will either kill it completely or rewrite it from scratch
with Electron.

~~~
contravariant
Using a browser to read an Epub which is effectively just some bundled HTML
seems like a very logical thing to do to me.

~~~
ZuLuuuuuu
That is like saying a Zip file manager should also include Epub reader since
Epub is basically a zip file.

Reading a book and browsing web are fundamentally different activities and
need different UX and business logic. Putting book reading capabilities to a
browser makes the code base bloated in my opinion.

~~~
ryantriangles
I have to say I disagree there. "Our program for handling HTML+CSS content
should handle HTML+CSS content stored in containers" is a much more reasonable
idea than "Our program for opening containers should also handle whatever
content is inside those containers." It's a common thing for programs to do.
VLC plays videos in zip files and RetroArch plays games in zip files, for
example.

And I don't think reading a book and browsing the web are fundamentally
different activities. They're near-identical. The web was created as a way to
access documents consisting of text, images, and links to other points within
the current document or to other documents. A book is a document consisting of
text, images, and links to other points within the current document (endnotes,
footnotes, "see page X") or to other documents (references/citations). The UX
and features you'd want for a book reader are the same you'd want for a
browser's Reader Mode, as implemented by Edge, Firefox, and Safari. I don't
see any difference between reading an ePub file and reading a long article on
a website.

------
lenkite
I really wished they hadn't killed Edge. And I _love_ EPUB in Edge for
technical books - you can open several in different tabs and also search
within them. The browser is the most natural vehicle for EPUB! Using a third
party reader on Windows is going to be a pain.

~~~
anoncake
It boggles the mind. Literally everything happens in the browser except
reading hypertext documents.

------
agluszak
Why won't they just open source the reader instead of abandoning it? I would
love to have at least one 100% working epub reader on Windows...

~~~
piotrkubisa
> I would love to have at least one 100% working epub reader on Windows...

SumatraPDF is fine to read EPUBs on Windows (also supports PDF, MOBI, FB2,
CHM, XPS, DjVu) - it's free, open-source software [0][1].

[0]:
[https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf](https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf)

[1]: [https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-
reader.html](https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html)

------
sireat
Bizarre decision. I've done my share of epub wrangling by hand (that is with
Sigil).

Epubs are basically zipped HTML. How hard would it have been to leave basic
support?

So now one has to "freeze" Edge to keep epub support.

I doubt it is as easy as moving Edge to a different folder. Probably need to
mess with regedit as well.

------
Endy
Oh, it could do that? I still use Calibre and Sigil. Then again, how can any
browser not in some way support ePUB? It's just a bunch of hyperlinked XML
files in a container. Rename it to a .ZIP and you're good to go.

------
fencepost
While I'm sure that there are some adequate ePub readers for Windows desktops,
I find myself doubting that there are many actual good ePub readers. At the
very least when I looked from a Windows phone a year or two back there was
nothing very good in the Windows App Store. Maybe Microsoft's push towards the
Surface family particularly the Surface Go as a tablet means that there will
be something worthwhile.

At least, that's the dream.

~~~
fencepost
This is quite late, but maybe useful for later thread viewers.

[https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_software#Windows](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_software#Windows)

------
niceworkbuddy
This is really unfortunate. Killing one of the best applications? I mean it's
fast, reliable, simple, easy to use, integrated...

------
phjesusthatguy3
"X browser is killing support for Y format"

Well, good. Now we can go back to when browsers handed files off to helper
apps that supported the formats in question. I'm all for it.

~~~
jackcodes
You say this now but I’m, for one, very glad pdf.js exists.

------
darekkay
After getting a Windows Tablet, I was looking hard for a good epub/pdf reader
with annotations. To my surprise, Edge was by far the best reader out there.
However, a few weeks later an update killed the annotations feature - I just
couldn't save them anymore. None of the support-provided solutions has worked.
I then started using Calibre to convert my epub files into azn3 and open them
in the Windows Kindle app, which is also quite nice.

------
hackerbrother
Very annoying, but I guess makes sense as chromium doesn't support epub and
they'd want to keep the different edges consistent. And the old edge will be
gone soon anyways..

A natural question is: is edge still going to be the default PDF reader in
Windows? And will edge's pdf viewer look just like chrome's

~~~
WorldMaker
Probably and it does in Dev and Beta builds (which is a disappointment because
"Edge Classic" PDF Viewer was better and Chrome's a distinct regression in
some disappointing ways).

~~~
hackerbrother
yeah, you'd think it wouldn't kill them to have whatever you call the opposite
of continuous scrolling?

------
IloveHN84
They are starting wrapping up and deprecating Edge classic, as the Chromium
one is now in beta

------
dajohnson89
Can someone explain why one would use ePub, vs pdf? PDF seems way more
popular.

~~~
piotrkubisa
I'd say PDF is all about presentation, while ePub/Mobi is closer to real books
that focus on content and legibility.

EPubs are perfect for long-lengthy documents, where you can bookmark position
to given line of text (not page, so I'd say it's more precise to get back in
which paragraph you've finished reading), everything is
searchable/copyable/highlightable, formatted into single-column, usually
justified, wrapped using hyphenation, easy to change font size, colors (i.e.
day/night mode) and there isn't strict paper (canvas) size. Basically, it
increases accessibility and focus.

While the PDF is just like a ZIP (I think those formats share the same
popularity), that consist collection of numbered crisp, anti-aliased PNGs and
SVGs, sometimes with an attached metadata. I often hear, there isn't any
chance to PDF document look different on other device. However, PDF is just a
subset of PostScript (hence the name) and has many versions (standardized as a
public document, by ISO, by other parties or just paywalled)[1]. Fortunately,
quite old PDF1.5 version has majority of features used by typical document
creator, also fact that there aren't many competing implementations and they
seem to be up-to-date with PDF2.0 convinced users and developers to use it.
That's worth noting, PDF supports reflow [0], but it is far from perfect and I
guess many bookworms will refrain from using it at all.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Portable_Docume...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Portable_Document_Format_\(PDF\))

[1]: [https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-
ac...](https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-
accessibility-features.html#reflow_a_pdf)

------
lcnmrn
Can't they develop an EPUB extension for Chrome (new Edge)?

~~~
WorldMaker
Possibly, but they likely don't have any incentive to do that and are just
going to leave it to third-party devs. Their eBooks store for mobile was the
reason they added it to Edge Classic in the first place, and that store has
already shut down because no one was using it.

------
superkuh
I wasn't aware of _any_ browsers having epub support. Additionally, the
practice of using browsers as your OS is bad. Native applications are the way
to go. Pdf support should also be removed from all browsers.

~~~
penagwin
> Pdf support should also be removed from all browsers.

Why? Instead of opening a PDF like any other webpage, or image, or video, etc.
Which is instant and doesn't require any mental focus shifting, I should
instead download the PDF, and use a PDF viewer instead?

For something so ubiquitous it seems kind of silly. Browsers are for browsing
and consuming content, if a specific type of content has widespread usage, I
see no reason not to include it.

~~~
jolmg
> Which is instant and doesn't require any mental focus shifting

Opening URLs from the browser to native apps specialized for their format
shouldn't be non-instant or require any mental focus shifting.

> Browsers are for browsing and consuming content

"Browser" is short of "Web Browser". They're meant primarily for HTML pages.
General "browsing and consuming content" is too broad. You're including file
managers and multimedia players in that. There's no reason to concentrate
everything into a single program. Shifting between specialized applications
should be seamless. If it's not, the window manager / desktop environment is
lacking configuration / features.

> if a specific type of content has widespread usage, I see no reason not to
> include it.

Because you end up with a bloated mess. The modern web browser is an OS inside
an OS.

~~~
derefr
> "Browser" is short of "Web Browser". They're meant primarily for HTML pages.

I don't see how you get from the first of these statements to the second. Web
browsers browse _the web_ —an interlinked set of hypertext documents. A
"hypertext document" being anything that embeds URLs you can tell the browser
to navigate to, usually by clicking. A PDF _is_ a "hypertext document."

> There's no reason to concentrate everything into a single program.

An ePub _is also_ a hypertext document, though. And one that is made out of
HTML and CSS files! Would you suggest that a web browser shouldn't be able to
open an MHTML archive? Because an ePub is almost exactly the same format, just
with a different base CSS style + media selector. (There are some restrictions
on scriptability, but from what I recall those are ePub UA restrictions, not
restrictions in the standard.)

> Shifting between specialized applications should be seamless.

What if you could shift between specialized applications... inside other
applications? Remember OLE? That's how web browsers have traditionally
displayed most formats. The whole need for special plugins for QuickTime,
Flash, ActiveX, Java, etc. was just to allow those formats to be embedded _in_
HTML pages. But if you're just opening a URL in the web browser and handing
the viewport over to a COM component to render—browsers (and many other types
of applications) do that just fine, without any need for "concentrating
everything into a single program."

