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JanMartin444's avatar
JanMartin444
Copper Contributor
May 05, 2022

Microsoft Edge can't download, open and keep a file with a long name

I have an MSG file with a file name that is 218 characters long

 

When I upload this MSG file to any website and try to download and open the file, Microsoft Edge prompts me to Keep the file and then it says "Can't download"

 

If I use a shorter length file name it works


There is a bug with Edge here as it works as expected in Google Chrome

  • josh_bodner's avatar
    josh_bodner
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 07, 2022
    I think this may just be regular file length limitation in Windows. If you try saving the file to a different folder with fewer characters in the path, does it work? Similarly, Chrome's temp folder may just have fewer characters in its path, so making the file name longer in Chrome or saving in a different folder with more characters in the path than Chrome's temp folder may make it fail.
    • JanMartin444's avatar
      JanMartin444
      Copper Contributor
      May 07, 2022

      josh_bodner yes the issue only occurs for files with long names which is common for emails which take on the subject as the file name 

       

      Chrome seems to handle any file length gracefully, if I put in a file name longer than windows can handle it just truncates it

       

      from an end user perspective it doesn’t make sense why windows, outlook and edge (all MS products) wouldn’t work together whereas chrome does

      • josh_bodner's avatar
        josh_bodner
        Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
        May 10, 2022
        Ah, so if there's a difference between Chrome and Edge, then I agree that it's a bug. I see two distinct modes of failure in Edge. If the file name alone is longer than the max path, saving explicitly is denied with an error dialog telling you the filename is invalid (which is a little misleading). Then, if the file name + the path is longer than max path, saving silently fails, and the download is still in its prompting state if you enabled the option to ask what to do with downloads.

        In Chrome, I still get the explicit failure if the name alone is too long, but I do see slightly different behavior for the in-between case. In Chrome, it explicitly fails with a download error, which isn't quite what you're describing, but is still arguably better than what Edge is doing, so I'll ask the downloads team if we can get some better error detection.

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