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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)

#251

Post by erikpukinskis »

jacquesm wrote: post #222
skybrian wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a user agent change makes the software slower for a platform then that's not exactly an accident so somebody must have had the intention to make it run buggy. This has nothing to do with 'making it run well on platforms you care about' but it is 'making it run bad on platforms you don't care about'. It takes more code for the software to act in this way (this is what proves this is intentional and not accidental),…

> If a user agent change makes the software slower for a platform then that's not exactly an accident so somebody must have had the intention to make it run buggy

That's not necessarily true. For example they might be doing polyfills that are slower than the native windows implementation.

I feel like I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thinking everywhere. The canonical example for me is lately is "he voted for Trump/Hillary therefore he must support groping/war/whatever".

I wish people would ease up on these kinds of deduction-based motivation attribution. It's my view that there enough self-professed unethical motivations for us to work against, without speculating. The speculation just muddies the waters.

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

#252

Post by golfer »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #185

"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.…

Well, Microsoft often doesn't get the benefit of the doubt because of their history of incredibly aggressive, borderline unethical behavior. Being a convicted monopolist tends to color people's attitudes to a company. Let alone something ridiculous like trying to destroy the open source movement in its nascent stages, stealing Google's search results, or running the completely insane Scroogled campaign. And all the other things Microsoft has done to erode good will.

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

#253

Post by cpg »

Microsoft did the same thing way back with CPUID .. when it was Intel, it worked well. Otherwise (AMD, Transmeta), they would use very inefficient operations instead of SSE (IIRC), slowing down benchmarks that used media (like players, etc) and Photoshop. This is from a distant life in the past, but I think it was not limited to use of SSE.

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

#254

Post by blahblah12 »

"This is certainly a bug. It is not a targeted attacked against Linux users. Report it to Microsoft. Microsoft is just doing really shitty feature detection using User Agent strings instead of, well actual feature detection. I was able to reproduce the same result by setting my User Agent to Firefox 52 on Windows 98. If I set it to a "more realistic" user agent like IE 7 on Windows XP, it would actually redirect me to a busted page to upgrade my browser instead of Word Online. It appears if Microsoft cannot figure out your User Agent (including your OS as part of it), it gives you a busted experience."

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

#255

Post by tajen »

djent wrote: post #235
bubblethink wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of Linux's recent success (I know it's still a tiny fraction) is just because of Google. I can't imagine using Linux if you take away the ability to Google. The fact that usually the results are posts by actual people and not some company stooge makes a world of difference.

You get the same results on DuckDuckGo, etc. there's no search engine lock-in here.

Sorry, doesn't DDG use Google as a back-end, just anonymizing the results?

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

#258

Post by interdrift »

diggan wrote: post #153
Keverw wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that interesting too. I'm not familiar with office 365, but isn't it web based? So why does it matter what browser or OS you use?

If the one creating a product also creates a OS, making that product run faster on your OS compared to others makes your OS look better I guess.

highly doubt that microsoft crafted this product to have lowe performance on purpose.

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

#259

Post by 21 »

adsfqwop wrote: post #100
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.

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.

My 7 year old audio interface (E-MU 0404 USB 2.0 for who cares) started making BSODs after upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. The latest manufacturer drivers were for Vista.

I reported it on answer.microsoft.com. They asked for a crash dump. Complied. Another non-ms person analyzed the crash dump and suggested that it's USB 3.0 related. Disabling that in the BIOS solved the issue.

But the MS guys kept on going. A few weeks later, a reply that they managed to get their hands on a similar device (!!, cost about $200), but they couldn't find a driver, so they asked for mine. Pointed them to the online driver location (hidden on manufacturer site). Some time after that they commented that they managed to reproduce the BSOD. A few months later they released a fix (into Windows).

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

#260

Post by c3534l »

cortesoft wrote: post #221
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an end user, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between 'made to run buggy' and 'put no effort in to make it not buggy'. They are most likely doing the 'put no effort in to make it not buggy' action, and it just appears that they are doing it on purpose.

But the only time it is buggy if you SAY it's Linux. If you say it's Windows, it works fine. That's not having the software passively become buggy, that's CHANGING the way the software works if and only if the OS is Linux, but working correctly if it's told (but isn't actually) Windows.

I don't think this is a conspiracy, but I don't think the characterization that users think that because OneDrive works on Windows better than Linux, buggy by inaction is assumed to be buggy by action: this situation is far more damning than that.

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