Forum Discussion
Use Calibre E-book manager (free) to read your EPUB files
Ibukun Momson wrote:Are you actively working on the Edge code base? Or are you a part of the Edge dev team? You can put in a word for those of us interested in the legacy Edge epub reader. It may not be priority for the team as FedeDiLo mentioned earlier, but if they see there's interest, some developers could be assigned to the task, seeing as they have already done it on the legacy Edge. It definitely is not as difficult as building from scratch.
No I'm not, how about you?
there is an interest? then there is software for it.
there are contradicting comments here.
you said your problem is not features which other Epub readers have, problem is the lack of "elegance" in them.
then you said you want Edge to only open Epub files, nothing else. well that won't be elegant.
that will be how other E-book readers on the market are.
HotCakeX As I understand it, Microsoft's decision that Edge won't render EPUBs any more is related to the transition to the new (Chromium-based) rendering engine core. I suspect that the old Edge EPUB-reader depended, for some of its functionality, on some rather clever interactions with the old EdgeHTML/Chakra engine - and that it turned out to be too hard (=expensive) to re-implement once Edge was instead using the Chromium engine underneath.
So in asking Microsoft to publish and maintain the old Edge EPUB reader as a standalone app, you're actually asking them to maintain the EdgeHTML/Chakra engine. That's a big chunk of code, and it's not used in any other Microsoft product, and it's quite likely to get broken by future OS releases - i.e. keeping it working would be a significant maintenance effort.
(Disclaimer: I don't know any of the details of the internals of Edge, I am just relying on published articles, and on my own personal experience of building rendering code in EPUB-reading apps; I am the developer of the Freda app, mentioned in this thread).
- Spoiler
Ibukun Momson wrote:First good job with Freda! I've been a very long time user. You are making very good points about dependencies on EdgeHTML/Chakra. But I think they can do a feature freeze on EdgeHTML. In any case, the legacy Edge engine is still being preserved for those that need its features and have already built dependencies on it (similar to Internet explorer mode being implemented in the chromium edge). Since book readers are not extremely fast moving/changing apps, this may not be an expensive option.
The Edge legacy has been on feature freeze for a while now, meaning nothing new was added to it, no new feature.
EdgeHTML and IE are not even comparable.
Internet explorer once had so many users, even +90% market share. EdgeHTML never got more than 10% market share.
that is why IE is still being maintained for compatibility purposes and EdgeHTML Will disappear very much sooner.
another reason for that is the fact that Edge legacy has only been kept active for 3-4 years while IE was active for more than 10 years.
so it is expensive to keep old Edge stuff maintained.
jrc14 wrote:HotCakeX As I understand it, Microsoft's decision that Edge won't render EPUBs any more is related to the transition to the new (Chromium-based) rendering engine core. I suspect that the old Edge EPUB-reader depended, for some of its functionality, on some rather clever interactions with the old EdgeHTML/Chakra engine - and that it turned out to be too hard (=expensive) to re-implement once Edge was instead using the Chromium engine underneath.
So in asking Microsoft to publish and maintain the old Edge EPUB reader as a standalone app, you're actually asking them to maintain the EdgeHTML/Chakra engine. That's a big chunk of code, and it's not used in any other Microsoft product, and it's quite likely to get broken by future OS releases - i.e. keeping it working would be a significant maintenance effort.
(Disclaimer: I don't know any of the details of the internals of Edge, I am just relying on published articles, and on my own personal experience of building rendering code in EPUB-reading apps; I am the developer of the Freda app, mentioned in this thread).
Thank you, all of them make sense
First good job with Freda! I've been a very long time user. You are making very good points about dependencies on EdgeHTML/Chakra. But I think they can do a feature freeze on EdgeHTML. In any case, the legacy Edge engine is still being preserved for those that need its features and have already built dependencies on it (similar to Internet explorer mode being implemented in the chromium edge). Since book readers are not extremely fast moving/changing apps, this may not be an expensive option.
