Forum Discussion
Use Calibre E-book manager (free) to read your EPUB files
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).
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.
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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.
