Data URI link <a href="data: doesn't work in Microsoft Edge

Neither IE nor Microsoft Edge support navigating to data URIs. MSDN claims that this is for security reasons.

The only solution is to link, using a scheme that is supported such as file:// or http://, to some resource that contains the content.

Interestingly enough, older versions of IE (I'm talking older than 6) supported a precursor to data URIs in the about: URI scheme, though only HTML was supported this way. Those URIs no longer work today and simply redirect to "Navigation canceled" (previously "Action canceled").

You can try using navigator.msSaveBlob in order to download the data URI in IE/Edge:

var a = document.getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
a.addEventListener('click', function (e) {
    if (navigator.msSaveBlob) {
        var bytes = atob(a.href.split(',')[1]), array = [];
        for(var i = 0; i < bytes.length; i++) array.push(bytes.charCodeAt(i));
        navigator.msSaveBlob(new Blob([new Uint8Array(array)], {mime: "text/plain"}), "file.txt");
        e.preventDefault();
    }
});

Since IE and Edge do support <img> tags with a data URI as the source, you can fudge a link to an image using javascript to write to the document:

<a href="javascript:document.write('<img src=data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAA
AANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQAQMAAAAlPW0iAAAABlBMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAAM0l
EQVR4nGP4/5/h/1+G/58ZDrAz3D/McH8yw83NDDeNGe4Ug9C9zwz3gVLMDA/A6
P9/AFGGFyjOXZtQAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC />')">link</a>