Microsoft Is Killing EPUB Support In Edge Classic (thurrott.com) 68
Microsoft is killing support for the EPUB document format in Edge classic, and it won't be supported in the new, Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge. Thurrott reports: "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." Aside from the contorted grammar and word usage in the notification -- it's "support" not "be supporting," Microsoft -- the linked webpage is a "Reading room" area on the Microsoft Store that includes audiobook apps in addition to e-book apps. So good luck with that.
Microsoft provides a more grammatically correct explanation for the change on its Microsoft Edge support site, which notes that "Microsoft Edge will no longer support e-books that use the .epub file extension." The site also links to the same terrible Microsoft Store area, but adds that "you can expect to see more added over time as we partner with companies like the DAISY Consortium to add additional, accessible apps... These apps are expected to be available in the Microsoft Store after September 2019." Given that, it's likely that EPUB support will disappear in Edge classic sometime after those apps appear in the Store.
Microsoft provides a more grammatically correct explanation for the change on its Microsoft Edge support site, which notes that "Microsoft Edge will no longer support e-books that use the .epub file extension." The site also links to the same terrible Microsoft Store area, but adds that "you can expect to see more added over time as we partner with companies like the DAISY Consortium to add additional, accessible apps... These apps are expected to be available in the Microsoft Store after September 2019." Given that, it's likely that EPUB support will disappear in Edge classic sometime after those apps appear in the Store.
Wtf Grammar Nazi? (Score:1)
It may be bad style, but it's not strictly wrong.
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"Microsoft Edge will no longer be supporting [sic]"
This is not a grammatical error Future continuous tense? will .. be supporting"
The submitter's suggested "Microsoft Edge will no longer be support" is definitely wrong.
Skitt's Law, "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself"
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Good (Score:4, Insightful)
XHTML? (Score:5, Informative)
Stop stuffing so much stuff into the browser,
Do you have any idea what *is inside* an epub file?
Hint: it's not a derivative of the Windows Metafile piece of crap.
And displaying XHTML is literaly the job of a browser.
Displaying EPUB and CHM archives of (X)HTML is about the only extra function which isn't too much bloat in a browser.
(Conversly, that's why it's cheap and simple to implement a web browser on e-Readers).
But hey, never mind. Calibre is an awesome software and it's both opensource and available on all major platforms.
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But hey, never mind. Calibre is an awesome software and it's both opensource and available on all major platforms.
Building Calibre requires a complex tool chain that uses most major programming and scripting languages along with a warehouse of libraries. Has anyone on /. (outside the developers) successfully built it?
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Please tell the 3 people reading EPUBs using Edge (Score:4, Informative)
that everyone else in the world uses Calibre for EPUBs and ebook management (Windows and Linux versions, too).
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not on my phone I don't
everywhere else, yes.
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Install Aldiko on your phone and then you can use Calibre for your phone too. That's what I do.
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but if I have Aldiko on phone why would I need calibre there?
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I never said you'd use Calibre on the phone... You use Calibre to manage the EPUBs you are putting on your phone to read with Aldiko or whatever.
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er, no I wouldn't. I'd just put epubs on the phone. the epubs have the proper metadata
no point whatsoever to have calibre involved.
so in summary, Calibre is only useful on two major platforms most have
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> Aldiko contains ads and IAPs, eww.
Oh my God, someone actually wants to get paid for their work, quelle horreur!! How dare they!!
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> But you're just butthurt because you didn't know about the alternatives, got schooled and now you're trying to lash out, oblivious to how much more stupid it makes you look.
Yeah, that's exactly it. I find an app in the Play store that does exactly what I want it to do and it serves an ad here and there to me at a very tolerable rate so I use it and enjoy reading books with it. What a MORON I AM!!!!
It must be exhausting being you with the constant purity tests for your life...
Re:Please tell the 3 people reading EPUBs using Ed (Score:5, Informative)
kulaga snorted:
that everyone else in the world uses Calibre for EPUBs and ebook management (Windows and Linux versions, too).
I use FBReader both on my Android phone and on my Windows 7 media computer. Abandonware or not, the Windows version works fine for my needs, and the Android version has all kinds of plug-ins to handle various ebook formats, including PDFs. I also use Calibre occasionally, but it's such a resource hog - and it takes so flinkin' long to load from a physical disk - that I mainly use it to generate ebook files from Word source files, and to convert ebooks from one format to another.
I tried Edge once. That was more than enough exposure to demonstrate to my complete satisfaction what a thoroughgoing piece of warm, stinking, parasite-infested shit it truly is ...
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Tried it back when firefox's webextensions brouhaha hit, and it's utterly awful. Absolute metric shit ton of "features" that each are probably needed by a handful of people which drown the actually relevant part out - the reader and it's basic settings. Spent half an hour trying to make the reader layout look even remotely readable, and it just wasn't on par with the old EPUB reader extension for firefox, with its simplicity and reading layout options being the primary focus, as a reader should be. Calibre
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Tried it back when firefox's webextensions brouhaha hit, and it's utterly awful. Absolute metric shit ton of "features" that each are probably needed by a handful of people which drown the actually relevant part out - the reader and it's basic settings. Spent half an hour trying to make the reader layout look even remotely readable, and it just wasn't on par with the old EPUB reader extension for firefox, with its simplicity and reading layout options being the primary focus, as a reader should be. Calibre is the poster child for feature creep making a product into a useless mess for most users.
Not to even mention that performance of that thing, likely due to all the "features" is a dumpster fire.
Actually no, Calibre is not a "features dumpster fire". It does what most Calibre uses want it to do.
While you can use Calibre as an ebook reader, that is not its primary purpose. Most people use Calibre to manage their (often large) ebook collections and actually read the books on a Kindle or similar portable device. The management features - updating ebook metadata, ebook repair, ebook conversion, reading lists, downloading today's news stories from your favourite news site and saving them as an epub, tra
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Did you notice that you just fully agreed with me that Calibre is a garbage tier ebook reader?
You know, that function that is getting removed from Edge?
Or are you suggesting that Edge was primarily an ebook collection manager? Because it wasn't. It didn't have even basic management utility, just like EPUB reader extension for Firefox. Those are both readers, designed to show you a book to read. Simple, useful for a lot of people.
And this entire discussion was specifically about the reader functionality bein
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Did you notice that you just fully agreed with me that Calibre is a garbage tier ebook reader?
Again, actually no. Calibre has a perfectly good ebook reader, which supports all the main ebook formats. You can even run it as a separate standalone app if you want. If you don't like it, don't use it; that is your prerogative. But that does not make it a "garbage tier ebook reader".
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I listed multiple reasons as to why its reader is garbage tier in my initial post. Post with which you agreed. The only defence of Calibre you could muster was, and I quote:
>While you can use Calibre as an ebook reader, that is not its primary purpose
Mining excavator also supports all the roads that your sedan does. It still makes for an awful family vehicle. Just like Calibre supports most of the ebook formats, but its reader is absolute garbage for actually reading ebooks.
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PDFs suck on small screens, and a lot of books are only available in Epub. I suppose you could unpack the Epub and try to view it in a browser but it will likely suck pretty bad. Of course, I just decrypt my epubs.
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Re:EPUB does not make any point. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:EPUB does not make any point. (Score:5, Informative)
It should be an absolute piece of cake for any webbrowser to support rendering epub files, because it literally is a web page.
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.epub is just a zip file with a renamed extension, typically containing .html and .css files, plus whatever custom fonts and images used by the book, optionally with some DRM mixed in.
I'm not sure if you're agree, disagreeing, or just making a separate point. Yes, there is nothing too fancy about epub. It doesn't detract from the benefits of using it.
It should be an absolute piece of cake for any webbrowser to support rendering epub files, because it literally is a web page.
And yet, it isn't a standard feature of browsers. Not really sure why Edge is the only mainstream browser that supports it(for now) without an add-on, or why they're getting rid of that support. I mean, I'm sure the removal is because chromium doesn't have built in support. But, I can't imagine adding it in would be that difficult when ther
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Not really sure why Edge is the only mainstream browser that supports it(for now) without an add-on, or why they're getting rid of that support.
My gut-feeling guess:
Adding support to just display an *.epub to the browser would be trivial.
Porting all the sandbox/firewall/detection of malware parts that happen on multiple layers from corporate firewalls/OS virus scanners/browser sandboxes to catch the same malware approach hidden in an *.epup zip file would probably be a slightly more challenging task...
Doesn't matter much as long as not many people use Edge, but the more people start to use it, the more likely someone will try to find an attack vect
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And of course nobody puts any JavaScript into HTML files ever....
And nobody ever put an entire Scripted Content Documents paragraph in the official epup specifications, no....
https://www.idpf.org/epub/30/s... [idpf.org]
Re: EPUB does not make any point. (Score:2)
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PDF is a format for printing, so you can't change font size and reflow the text, because every line is set at a fixed position inside its page.
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Person posted in fixed space font tries telling everybody else in which formats they should publish.
Hmm.
Windows eReaders (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the things that amazes me the most is how Windows doesn't really have a decent Epub reader. The FBreader version available on the Windows is basically abandonware. It's the chief reason I gave away the Windows 10 tablet I was given, because you couldn't jailbreak it to put a better OS on its and because you couldn't even use it as a decent eReader.
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There is also AlReader. I use it also on android.
Re:Windows eReaders (Score:4, Informative)
If you are using ebooks on Windows, I'd suggest you look at Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/ )
It contains an epub reader program, but more importantly, the main program is excellent for maintaining your library.
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Well, Edge was pretty ok for that, I think. I never used my tablet as a full-time ebook reader, but it worked very well for me whenever I needed, though it might be missing some features if you use it mainly for this purpose. But it's always available and has nice rendering, smooth scrolling and scaling.
It's pretty bizarre they're specifically killing off this functionality now when Edge is going to get replaced with a Chrome clone soon now anyway.
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Edge is a terrible ebook reader.
But there does seem to be a market gap. Hmm....
Abandonware (Score:2)
I never understood why this bothered people. This piece of software does exactly what it was designed for without problems. Who cares if its being maintained? You have reached the pinnacle of its design. Stop. The author's job is finished.
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I use FBreader to sync bookmarks between my phone and tablet. The version available for Windows is an ancient beta that doesn't have that functionality. I tried a couple of android emulators but they were slow and clunky.
Grammar is fine (Score:5, Informative)
As written, they're correctly using the negative form of the future progressive tense. See examples here [yourdictionary.com]. For a professional writer, this Thurrott guy doesn't seem to know much about grammar.
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Considering that english has a kind of broad grammar, I really wondered about that snarking comment, to.
As written, they're correctly using the negative form of the future progressive tense. I could not have worded it like that, though :D
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Grammar is always flexible. I can verb any noun I want, explain exactly why it is no problem to casually split an infinitive, and justify the obvious importance of the oxford comma. All without compromising readability.
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So where was the dashslot announcement that they would no longer be editing submissions?
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They never have. I used to send in corrections to them every day about 10 years ago, till I realised they just really did not care about grammar, about dupes, about blatant hoaxes about stories that were 5 years old with a new daye on them....
Who uses Edge anyways? (Score:5, Interesting)
Strikes me as pretty irrelevant "news".
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Edge is irrelevent (Score:2)
Edge is irrelevant. Less than 5% of desktop users use Edge.
Re:Edge is irrelevent (Score:5, Funny)
How else are you going to download Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc.?
(:
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ftp.exe of course.
Great.. (Score:2)
Maybe they can kill pdf support in Edge also, because we all saw how well that worked when trying to print a pdf from Edge....
Reader (Score:3)
Mixed messaging much?
That grammar is fine. (Score:2)
Grammar (Score:1)
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Why should it be "support" and not "be supporting," ?
I'm pretty sure the person cannot read, and missed the word "be" every time.
DAISY (Score:2)
""you can expect to see more added over time as we partner with companies like the DAISY Consortium to add additional, accessible apps.."
Daisy supports DRM, so of course MS would push you to use that. Plain, open format ePubs are too accessible.
MS only grudgingly supports open formats. Back in the 90s, Gates wanted to just put Word Doc format files on the Internet, sneered at HTML. whe he had no choice, bought IE from someone and kept trying to add proprietary extensions to it.
But would never read an ebook
Fallout from MS/B&N settlement? (Score:2)
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Until recently, Edge was a Microsoft-developed web browser, which apparently had epub support. That Edge browser is being retired. It's being replaced with a Microsoft-flavored release of Chromium rebranded as Edge. Chromium apparently does not have epub support, so the new Edge will not have epub support.
No big loss (Score:2)
Edge is dead anyway (Score:2)
And if it wasn't, this alone would make it "game over".
Are they really that stupid?