If it is that easy, there must be a business/political reason for not supporting it. Does anyone have a clue what that might be?
Presumably if Google decided to add EPUB support, Edge would get it back too, but Microsoft hasn't decided that feature is valuable enough to add onto their modifications.
I also think it's particularly sad that Windows 10 had a perfectly good EPUB app, Reader, that Microsoft deprecated aggressively to force everyone to read eBooks in Edge... only to remove eBook support from Edge too.
An ebook, unzip, is rarely bigger than 1Mo, which is lower than what most page are today.
Oh no, we can't have that. Here are some "beautiful, performant and lightweight" Electron ePUB readers/organizers: https://www.electronjs.org/apps?q=epub
Rather than complaining about the Electron apps, write better cross-platform apps that don't use Electron.
I know it's fashionable to dog on Electron, but if it didn't fill a legitimate need, people wouldn't use it.
It's easy to compare an Electron app, that actually exists, with some imaginary native app that doesn't.
It's not so easy to find the budget and personnel to actually build dedicated apps for minority platforms. The choice generally isn't between "bloated Electron app" and "sleek native app". It's between "bloated Electron app" and "no app at all".
I suspect Electron frequently fills a need for the developers, instead of their users. It's easy to deploy, cross-platform and stable, I give you that, but the users pay for it with RAM, disk, CPU and energy.
A single user might not mean much, but multiply that by the millions of Electron programs installed, that's the scale of lost resources that pay for the advantages of Electron.
If there's "no need" for them, why are people using them? How come you get to decide what other people "need"?
> I suspect Electron frequently fills a need for the developers, instead of their users.
It fills the need of the users to have actual apps they can install and run, rather than imaginary ones.
> that's the scale of lost resources that pay for the advantages of Electron.
People don't hand-write programs in assembly language any more, either, even though that means that you can no longer write a word processor that runs in 12K of RAM.
I'm not saying all Electron programs are bad. VSCode, for example, is surprisingly good for many use cases, and being an IDE with many features, its resource usage is pretty justified.
I'm also not buying that people need software that only exists as Electron programs. Check the categories in https://www.electronjs.org/apps, there's even taskbar notifications and app launchers, do those merit running a dedicated browser?
It's not that users need "non-imaginary" software and Electron fills that need, it's that most users don't know about native and web frameworks, and they will install software as long as their computer can run it, even if better alternatives exist right now.
I see this sort of assertion pop up often, but it never is accompanied by specific verifiable examples of what those options are.
Can you point out a single example of said native software that fills that role in every platform? A single one.
(For instance : VLC, Spyder...)
What is python qt support like for android and so forth by the way?
Compared with simple html+javascript running on a webview, Qt is relatively hard to maintain and develop, relies on source code generations and processors to work, prototyping tools are subpar and undermaintained, has no support for centralized theming, it's basic support for component-specific theming is already CSS shoved in a convoluted way, its model/view take is absurd and very poorly engineered, and yeah there's the fact that it forces you to write frontend code in C++. But wait, it's not even C++ because it requires code to be preprocessed to generate boilerplate code.
And let's not pretend that Qt's widgets successor is already a markup+javascript combo that takes the bad parts of javascript and bundles it with the bad parts of a custom markup language.
Calibre seems to use all the memory after some time and then it starts to use swap memory...