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

answers.microsoft.com

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

#211

Onedrive is an embarrassingly subpar product for Msoft to be pushing anyway. I can't think of a single worthwhile use-case?

Use case: your company uses Office 365, and you want your cloud storage to be integrated with the rest of the Office 365 apps, and you don't otherwise care about the quality of the cloud storage app.

I'm going to basically cede my point to you because, honestly, Office 365 is not a bad product and even though I would not personally use it, I have to admit that this is a valid use-case, haha.

I do have to point out your note about "not otherwise caring about the quality of the cloud storage app" which is more towards my point.

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

#212

"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.…

Terrible customer service here is undeniable though. Customer support should gain you customers, not lose them. Microsoft needs to address that.

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

#213
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "its a business decision" doesn't justify unethical and potentially illegal behavior. This is either incompetence or malice. If it is malice it falls well on the wrong side antitrust behavior. If its incompetence, well it isn't much better is it?

Although I don't think it's unethical to intentionally make the experience slower for some users, I'm not trying to justify it. I'm trying to explain that as long as Microsoft's incentives align with making Windows dominant, they're going to engage in behaviors to make it happen, including things like artificially slowing connections from non-Windows machines. Instead of saying "MS is releasing stuff open-source, the…

So why do you say anti-competitive behavior wouldn't be unethical?

Sorry for the double negatives, I am just trying to understand. It seems clear to me that potentially hurting paying customers to increase one's own wealth is obviously unethical. This of course presumes malice, which hasn't yet been proven.

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

#214
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?

yes, but the hypothesised cause is an unhandled exception when it doesn't find a UA string from its list of expected UA strings, and that case might just hang until a timeout of some kind.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost always, nobody has any intention to "make it run buggy." It's about making it run well on platforms you care about (and officially support), and ignoring the others. Complicated software is usually fragile enough that it will have similar results.

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

#216
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

For one, every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled. Is that monopolistic behaviour? Should EU require Linux developer to provide "Choose your web browser" wizard popping up on every new Linux install, similar way it is on Windows?

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread. I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.

> I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site. To be fair, that isn't specific to Microsoft, and a lot of big company's support sites are useless. IME, Apple's Q&A discussion site is equally useless. The answers there are always along the lines of "That's by design, you can't do that." or "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?" I've had much better luck on apple.stackexchange.com

> "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?"

This. I can remember asking years ago, back when I had to work on OS X, asking how to turn off that freakin' annoying jumping icon in the system tray that leaped up and down after every successful print job until you dismissed it, just like an excited two-year-old telling you they went potty in the potty chair AGAIN, "Just like a big kid!" I can't imagine anyone thinking that attention-grabbing, ADHD-exacerbating, flow-destroying behavior was good by design, but was asked, "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?"

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of parts of Google have done UA-sniffing all over the place. Opera, even after being Chromium based, have had plenty of problems as a result: the UA doesn't match so therefore they get an "unsupported" or "degraded" experience.

Even basic Google search seems to do some UA sniffing. I run Firefox but usually browse with IE or Chrome user agents, and clicking the results on a search won't actually navigate to them

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread. I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.

As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.

Most Linux forum answers online are "do this voodoo I copied from someone else and don't understand".

It's a lot harder to pull a specific, coherent, considered answer out of the internet, which doesn't involve duct tape and breakable insecure awful things.

"How do I run x on startup" will as likely get you "download this Ruby script which calls IFTTT.com triggered by when your network adapter connects, btw install this binary wifi driver blob" as "put this with a plain text password in /etc/whoknowsbutitworks lol" as "on your distro with your shell the startup system is XYZ and the startup scripts run like a then b then /home/user/c so put it in ~/c"

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

#220
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

For one, every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled. Is that monopolistic behaviour? Should EU require Linux developer to provide "Choose your web browser" wizard popping up on every new Linux install, similar way it is on Windows?

Microsoft's​ behavior was illegal not because of bundling alone, but because of bundling a product (IE) in a different market with a product which was a monopoly (Windows) in what was held to be (based on additional Al evidence beyond mere bundling) an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize a different market.

So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox or Chromium, since none of those distributions have a monopoly to leverage to start with.

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