[DMcCunney]

One of the things I just got finished doing was to install the Win10 Creator's Update on my desktop. I got tired of waiting to be told it was available and forced it. It worked fine, though it took a long time. There was an initial heavy burst of activity as the software was downloaded and the upgrade process started, then hours where nothing appeared to be happening. It did finally tell me it was done, and several reboots would be required to complete installation.

One side effect of the Update was that Microsof't's new browser, Edge, started working. It failed to run under the profile I normally use, but since I run Firefox as production browser, I didn't much care. Since it did now work, I decided to poke at it a bit.

It's fast to invoke, and seems to comply with current web standards and be reasonably secure. It even has an extension capability, though little I actually want is currently available.

One thing that got added in recent builds is the ability to read ePub files in Edge. There's only one small problem. Edge has no current way to open files in the local file system. On other browsers, you can use file:// to navigate the local file system in the browser, but Edge doesn't support it. (I'm told the Edge developers are looking into doing that. Various developer comments indicate not being able to open local files in Edge rules out any use in development.)

I was bewildered. I can understand security constraints where you don't want the browser to write to the local file system, since what it was writing might be malicious, but not reading it?

Well, yes, Microsoft is heavy into cloud services these days, and folks there might have an optimistic notion that users will store everything on the cloud and nothing locally. But since we don't all have broadband fast enough to make effective use of the cloud like that, let alone whether we can afford cloud services at the level required, I expect to be dead and gone before this will be close to true.

I do wonder what the Edge team is thinking.
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Dennis