770946 - Ability to view ePub files in Firefox

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[enda]

I can view a video within Firefox, but not a format which is essentially a collection of xhtml files. Can it be possible to view ePub files within Firefox?

Comment 1

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

I strongly suspect this is designated as best handled by extensions focused on reading ebooks, such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/.

Comment 2

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

(In reply to enda from comment #0)
> I can view a video within Firefox, but not a format which is essentially a
> collection of xhtml files. Can it be possible to view ePub files within
> Firefox?

Hi Enda! Could you please give us a few URL examples to test? Even a test case would be very useful. Are you still experiencing this issue?  Thank you!

Comment 3

[Mike Gifford]

ePub is just encapsulated HTML, so why not use a browser to read it? 

I suspect that ePub will become increasingly important and hopefully begin to replace PDF as a document archive format.  PDF is basically supported by browsers so why not ePub?

As a developer, I'd also like to have better ePub support by Firefox so that it is easier to use tools like Firebug to manage them.

For accessibility, developing to a standard is critial.  Browsers have come a long way in this space, but I don't think there is any effort to do this with ePubs.  As good as firefox extensions might be, they aren't going to be as standards compliant as Firefox....  

I'd love to see Firefox just read ePub natively. I can't see that this would be a huge amount of code to accomplish this.

Comment 4

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

See https://github.com/openberg/lector-dev

It should do what you want.

Comment 5

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

I personally don't think that building support into Firefox is a good idea, but something like lector (mentionned in comment 4) is IMHO one of the most reasonable approach to the problem.

Comment 6

[Mike Gifford]

@Hubert I don't see how openberg is going to help make opening an EPUB as easy as opening a PDF. If you need to get something off of Github before you can load it, EPUB will always be a second class experience. 

I'd like it so that your oldest family or friend could click on a link to an EPUB and just have it open without knowing that you had to do something else first. Users should never be directed to GitHub to read a document.

Comment 7

[Hubert Figuiere [:hub]]

If I had closed the bug after commenting - as WORKSFORME/WONTFIX/INVALID, I could understand your anger, but right now I don't. Also maybe the problem is the lack of ePub reading application on the OS you are using. Firefox doesn't support .docx or .doc either nobody seems to make a fuss of it.

I was just suggesting how to get started on contributing a solution to solve the problem you didn't expose in your original query.

I'll un-CC myself instead.

Comment 8

[Mike Gifford]

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off angry. I realize this isn't a simple fix. Sometimes ascii sucks.

Thanks for suggesting an alternative that will help me today. I have no problem opening EPUB files, but I'm technical. 

I would appreciate it if this bug stayed open. 

.docx & .doc aren't open formats. They are also read/write formats. 

.pdf & .epub are both open standards that are widely adopted.  .pdf is now widely supported in most browsers.  I'd like to see .epub supported like .pdf is by the browser.

If folks had to download an app to read a .pdf file it wouldn't get much traction.

Comment 9

[Marat Tanalin]

Fwiw, Yandex Browser [1] (Chromium-based) also (besides Microsoft Edge) has built-in ePub support.

It’s really natural for web browser to have built-in support for HTML/CSS-based format, especially given that ePub is as widely used for e-books as PDF is, and PDF support is already built into Firefox.

Fwiw, OpenBerg Lector library does not work at all for me in all browsers I’ve tested (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, IE11), though if it did, it, moreover, could probably be built into Firefox.

EPub-viewing extensions are unfortunately low quality in general (at least I didn’t see any really quality one), and EPUBReader in particular litters the Firefox-profile’s folder with unpacked ePub contents instead of using memory or the legit OS-level TEMP folder (e.g. placed on a RAM drive for the purpose of saving SSD’s resource).

[1] https://browser.yandex.ru/

Comment 10

[Jed]

I agree, the ability to view ePub files natively would be great, especially as Microsoft Edge also does this, which gives it an edge over Firefox in terms of functionality. Some people may want to use Edge simply because it has ePub support.

Comment 11

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)

Comment 12

[Gregory Pappas [:gregp]]

Microsoft discontinued epub support in Edge a few years ago (source)

Comment 13

[Matěj Cepl]

(In reply to Josh Matthews [:jdm] from comment #1)

I strongly suspect this is designated as best handled by extensions focused
on reading ebooks, such as
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/.

I would agree, but there is no such extension for Android, for example.