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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)

#271

Post by debaserab2 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #261
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.

Skype was messed up for ages, they actually have a really cleaned up Linux client, it's based around Electron so it actually works a lot better than the older one. Skype is an example that they do care about Linux too.

Yikes, Skype is electron based? That explains why it hogs so much memory.

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

#272

Post by npizzolato »

sp0rk wrote: post #240
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.…

> Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them. Wouldn't this filter out a lot of legitimate bugs that just happened to be discovered first on an unsupported browser?

Not really. Once they get discovered and reported on a supported browser, it sounds like they'd be routed to the team. Theoretically, bugs could exist in supported browsers that only get reported in unsupported browsers, but you'd have to weigh the likelihood of that against randomizing the team investigating bugs in unsupported scenarios.

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

#273

Post by smhenderson »

mamon wrote: post #216
kbenson wrote: post #208

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?

Not every Linux distribution "comes with" Firefox or Chromium. They may be an option on the install disk and may even be part of the default install but they do not have to be installed and there are other choices (e.g. I typically install SeaMonkey because I like the mail client it comes with). In fact I can decide to install Linux on a PC and not install a browser at all. Last I checked it's still hard/impossible to remove IE/Edge from Windows. [1]

[1] Although admittedly the last real work I did in Windows was 7, so please correct me if the situation has changed.

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

#274

Post by adrianratnapala »

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.

No tajen, at least the Wikipedia article for DDG gives no hint that it uses the Google backend. Nor had I ever heard of such a thing.

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

#275

Post by Lievelingsduif »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #251
jacquesm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Hi…

I'm guessing you don't really understand what he's saying. He's saying that by pretending to be Windows instead of Linux the webapplication runs better. There's nothing native about it.

The same exact website/piece of software runs better by saying "Hi I'm on windows". This obviously means foul play.

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

#276

Post by emodendroket »

c3534l wrote: post #260
cortesoft wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

It seems entirely plausible that there are optimizations that are only applied on certain platforms or something with the idea that any platform should fall back to the slower but better-supported behavior.

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

#277

Post by flyinghamster »

21 wrote: post #259
adsfqwop wrote: post #100

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.

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.…

> 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 had one of those, and the Vista drivers were never released as a production version. Driver support for it was THE thing that kept me from upgrading from XP to 7, and also what convinced me to never again buy a Creative product.

The matter became moot, and XP took a hike, when it finally crapped out one day. My audio interface is now a Focusrite.

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

#278

Post by wisebit »

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.

I've always found it fascinating that Windows/Microsoft error messages seem to have some kind of UUID (Error #c101a053 is one I found on my search history from 5 years ago), but you _can't look them up by UUID_ on the MS help pages or even online (and sometimes they don't seem to even be unique). I've always wanted to know what they do with these numbers.

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

#279

Post by aendruk »

mhluongo wrote: post #2

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

It's just a very heavy page render due to the way asset preloading is implemented; details at [1]. Seems Linux user agents get a legacy method and Windows get a modern one.

You can see it yourself by viewing [2]. OneDrive renders several of those pages simultaneously.

[1]: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/x-B5T7tn...

[2]: https://powerpoint.officeapps.live.com/p/StaticLoad.aspx?wx=...

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

#280

Post by cookiecaper »

sqeaky wrote: post #213
cookiecaper wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO, most companies can't engage in anti-competitive behavior independently. You need a special status as a monopoly or a part of a cartel. For normal companies, normal behavior is "anti-competitive" because the point of business is to beat your competitors.

If we assign MS the role of a "typical business" instead of a monopoly (they have may been a monopoly 20 years ago, but it's hard to make that case now), Microsoft is under no ethical obligation a) to provide a client for other operating systems; or b) to ensure that performance parity exists between every client on every platform.

While it may not be super polite to release clients for other platforms and then subtly cripple them in order to drive users back to Windows, there's nothing below-the-belt about it IMO.

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