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Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
71–80 of 492 posts
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#72Unhelpful 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.
Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to giv…
I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out.
In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#73FWIW, I see this kind of thing regularly because I have the RandomAgentSpoofer extension installed on Firefox. Sometimes the page will look at the UserAgent and think it can't run X or Y so I will get an HTML-only version.
It's actually kinda interesting to see what the website does when it thinks my browser can't support certain stuff (which it can...I just like to avoid fingerprinting).
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
But user-agent parsing should be blazing fast, a one-liner regexp or similar, isn't it?
It seems something more like: case @useragent when 'Windows' send file fast when 'OSX' send file fast else sleep 3600
More likely something like:
resolve_renderer_module(user_agent.os)
where the osx/Windows ones are already loaded in RAM, but it has to try (and fail) to load the linux one every time somebody tries.
This is classic Hanlon's razor stuff.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.
This. People forget that they're _actively_ appearing to break it by using this UA detection. No company should _ever_ use user-agents for feature detection, because user agents themselves are screwy in so many ways [0]. Honestly, I feel like this was someone actively deciding to break the system on Linux (or any unrecognised UA). Wouldn't any reasonable developer just send back a fully-featured page if they couldn't…
Yea, call my cynical, but Microsoft Office is one of the few applications that doesn't have a good alternative on Linux. So this seems like a ploy to stop people from using Linux. At least the ones that would like to use Microsoft Office.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#76I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt in my mind here but this is a tough one to explain away.
I'm guessing that the customer service rep has no idea what the term "User-Agent" refers to. He just saw the word "Linux" in the post and then replied with a canned response.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#77Unhelpful 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.
Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to giv…
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#78Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Feedback from support teams is pretty much the only way the engineering team learns what we need to improve.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#80Unhelpful 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.
As the former head of a customer support department, I can tell you that the most important aspect of communication with a customer is empathy. Even more than expertise, if you can demonstrate that you care about their problem and will get to the bottom of it, the encounter will most likely result in customer retention.