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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)

#291

Post by daenney »

cortesoft wrote: post #225
daenney wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not in FireFox anymore. They sent alerts for a long time saying FireFox was losing support for hangouts, and now it doesn't work at all.

True. But temporary: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts....

Ironically that's being caused by WebRTC not having compatible enough implementations across all major browsers (and as an aside being disproportionally difficult to debug). Otherwise they would've just dropped the plugin and be done with it much earlier. Though I'm surprised they didn't act earlier.

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

#292

Post by Mithaldu »

Lievelingsduif wrote: post #275
erikpukinskis wrote: post #251

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 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.

You're guessing. Please look at what people say who investigated this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

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

#293

Post by AsyncAwait »

krylon wrote: post #193
ConceptJunkie wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It's not officially supported. It's not like Microsoft hasn't been doing this kind of thing to their competitors for the last 30 years.

But I doubt somebody would switch from Linux to Windows because OneDrive is faster there. Also, the percentage of desktops running Linux is still tiny relative to Windows. The last time I saw any numbers (about two or three years back), it was ~90% Windows, ~7.5% OS X, ~1.5% Linux, so there is little incentive for Microsoft to care about Linux desktops.

>But I doubt somebody would switch from Linux to Windows because OneDrive is faster there.

Not for this one reason, but for 'webpages just work faster on Windows', sure.

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

#294

Post by rsweeney21 »

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?

Statistically speaking, the odds of a bug being found first on an unsupported platform, which represents such a small segment of your users, are low. The odds of it only ever being found on an unsupported platform, even though it's not platform specific, probably means it's rare enough for the business not to care about it.

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

#295

Post by Symbiote »

glogla wrote: post #6

I have to admit, the whole exchange is pretty funny: > Hello, Onedrive for Business open is very slow on Linux (Chrome/Firefox) but with very fast with a "Windows" user-agent. > Hi DL, As Office 365 for Business services(e.g. SharePoint Online, including OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online) are not supported on Linux as shown below, for the best experience, we recommend the operating system listed in the article.…

My manager and I rejected OneDrive when we were comparing different services, because it was slow and unresponsive. I didn't think to try it on Windows, so we chose a competitor.

Linux users are a small minority, but I suspect they have well above average influence in what IT services are purchased.

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

#296

Post by bobbles »

krylon wrote: post #176
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.

> I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site. At least not from a Microsoft employee. Sadly, the majority of posts from Microsoft employees I have seen basically repeat the problem description, followed by "Did I understand that correctly?", sometimes people get generic advice like reboot their computer, make sure their system has all available updates installed, etc.

Dont forget the 'please provide a full system dump of every possible event and log for your error of 'word wont save''

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

#297

Post by Nullabillity »

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.

The new Skype client is crap compared to the old one. 99% of all settings are gone. Video calls are gone.

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

#298

Post by WaxProlix »

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),…

It's been mentioned a bunch in this thread already, but they're doing feature support detection by user-agent string. It's not malicious, it's sloppy.

Here's a quote from the /r/linux thread [1], courtesy of /u/angellus:

> 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.

1 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

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

#299

Post by skybrian »

bubblethink wrote: post #281
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.

>Almost always, nobody has any intention to "make it run buggy." Well, Microsoft has a long history of "making things buggy" everywhere else to create lock-ins. This instance may not be strictly related, but people's attitude has been shaped by years of anti-competitive stuff that MS has pulled.

They do have a reputation, but it's decades old, and things have changed quite a bit. I don't think we should base our conclusions on stale data.

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

#300

Post by jacquesm »

emodendroket wrote: post #276
c3534l wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that we're talking - as far as is visible to me at the moment - about server side behavior, something that need not change at all depending on the user's client.
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