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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)

#201
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Hangouts only work properly on Chrome?

It works fine in every browser, but you might need to download a small plugin if you're not on Chrome due to WebRTC being a standard but not a standard. Regardless of your browser, it'll heat your system up so you can fry an egg or broil a steak.

Yeah the Hangouts website is my main gripe with it. Great service for talking with friends and family. Absolutely horrible performance on their site.

Something to do with WebGL being used during background transitions would drop the performance of my graphics card into the dirt. Games running at the same time would incur a frame drop of 90% for the 5 seconds Hangouts is merely changing a PICTURE..

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Because nothing grinds my gears more than fake sympathy/empathy coupled with an inability/unwillingness to understand my problem and an urgency to get me off the phone. Which is pretty much how customer support works. What I want from customer support is for someone to take the time to understand why I am calling. Not to pat me on the head and tell me things will be alright while urgently trying to get rid of…

But that is exactly what the GP said. You want somebody to care about you and your problem and to make an effort to solve it.

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

#203
post #196

"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn't officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them.…

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

That just isn't true (and I worked on Chakra while at Microsoft).

I think you're thinking of J++ (Microsoft's version of Java, not JavaScript). Now JScript (Microsoft's version of ECMAScript) does have some minor differences in the dialect, but that was only because the ECMA standard was at a standstill back then. Mozilla had no problems extending their implementation to match either.

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

#204
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense... On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single inst…

Powershell has man too. It's an alias for get-help. Man get-command Get-help get-help

I know, and I like PowerShell's help system. But there are still plenty of commands available that are not PowerShell cmdlets.

But I agree, PowerShell is a huge improvement.

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

#206
post #125

Tangentially related, but Netflix also do some similar User-Agent sniffing logic for Linux users browsing with Firefox. Firefox does indeed support Widevine, but unless you pretend to be Chrome Netflix refuses to work. I got brushed off in much the same way as this user did when I tried to discuss the matter with customer support. In the end I carpet bombed a bunch of executives by guessing the email address format,…

You're correct that Netflix was using the user-agent to handle which browser can watch on Linux as a first check.

However Netflix has updated their system to allow Firefox to stream on Linux, just so you know.

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

#207
post #105
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

then how else would such behaviour be explainable? I thought about reasonable explanations but i doubt a little background process that notices a unsupported user agent would act up like this

[deleted]

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

#208
post #196

"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn't officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them.…

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

I think that's another case of assuming bad intentions. Once Microsoft had a slightly differently behaving version of JavaScript that was in use by hundreds of millions of people, including many enterprise environments with internally developed and bought solutions that required Internet Explorer and it's version of JS and ActiveX to function who more often than not were also large Microsoft customers, the idea of breaking all the existing functionality just to be compliant with a standard becomes a non-starter. Were there people in the company that liked this situation? Probably. That doesn't mean it had to come about through malice. It's easy to see how a similar situation with Chrome or Safari could occur if they had greater than 90% of market share.

The only reason we are where we are today is because there's much less of a single dominant player in the browser space, so using standards are incentivized.

P.S. Yes, MS got their market share through shipping the browser with the OS. While it may have led to a monopoly in the browser space (or close to a monopoly, depending on how you want to look at it), I think it's hard to say any one of us wouldn't have made the same decision to bundle them were we in the position of selling the OS and also putting out a browser.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be funny, but at the same time it's great to see this kind of feedback directly from the customers to the company. If someone listens up there, sooner or later they'll realize there is more money in the subscription business than in one-time OS purchases, and they will put the money where the mouth is.

I'm guessing (especially when you consider that OS X is in there) that it has more to do with the support burden and small number of people using Linux as a desktop OS than trying to get people to buy Windows.

So they make it run buggy in order to reduce the support burden??? Surely that makes for more support calls.

I'd have much more respect for them if they just came clean and said "we hate linux users, if you want to use that OS don't use our products because we try our best to make them not work on linux". Look at what they did with Skype for example. At least then we'd know not to try their stuff.

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