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Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

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Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#31

Post by rory096 »

This was reported on /r/linux yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

This user did some experimentation with user agents to narrow down the bug: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#35

Post by karrotwaltz »

ctrl-j wrote: post #7
mhluongo wrote: post #2

They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right? I thought this was the New Microsoft. Any other hypotheses?

I read in a comment on Reddit (lost the link at the moment), that it doesn't appear to be nefarious. Basically, they're trying to do feature detection based on UA instead of.. actual feature detection.

Google is also doing this with Universal 2nd Factor working on Chrome but not on Firefox (which supports U2F with an addon).

Can't tell if this is intentional though.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#36

Post by 0942v8653 »

TillE wrote: post #27
morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#37

Post by simias »

morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here.

If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support guy to escalate this to the devs when it only happens for an unsupported platform. And if they're purposefully throttling linux hosts then they won't admit to it there.

So the entire exchange (including Dam Lec deciding to abandon Onedrive) seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#38

Post by madmulita »

adrianpike wrote: post #17
davesque wrote: post #11

I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt in my mind here but this is a tough one to explain away.

Maybe they're injecting a brazillion polyfills if it's not a known user-agent?

Yet, it works as expected without the polyfills.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#39

Post by ohitsdom »

ainiriand wrote: post #8
dsr_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not throttling based on user-agent. It's just a bug that happens when the user-agent parser falls off a cliff when it exhausts the values that it knows about. A bug that Microsoft won't fix, because Linux is not supported.

But user-agent parsing should be blazing fast, a one-liner regexp or similar, isn't it?

The user-agent parsing is fast, it's the server-side rendering logic specific to Linux user-agents that is somehow terribly slow.

Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)

#40

Post by yebyen »

tyingq wrote: post #18
tankenmate wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no direct understanding but I have a hypothesis; - different generated html / js depending on user agent (UA) - bug fixes are rolled out on a UA by UA basis - bug fixes have been rolled out for Windows and Mac (supported) - but not for the "generic" HTML / JS output If this is true it will mean that anything other than the supported platforms will fall further behind as time goes by.

That sounds highly likely. Intentional throttling doesn't help Microsoft in this case. I don't think they view Linux desktops (aside from Chromebooks) as a serious threat. Why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users?

This reminds me of the article about the OneDrive team being allowed to introduce ads into Explorer because they don't care at all about the experience of using Windows and they just want more OneDrive users.

(Supporting documentation of the position "why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users"...)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13903701

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