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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)

#341

Post by pbhjpbhj »

WaxProlix wrote: post #298
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),…

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…

That commenter appears not to have heard of browser detection or UA sniffing, it has nothing to do with feature detection, they're a completely different method (and paradigm).

Nor should browser detection cause Firefox to follow a different switch in the code when on a different OS, not since about version 2 when I think there were bugs making that useful.

Really browser detection was something needed to handle MSIE way back in the day, or possibly other browsers before web fonts.

But this ain't browser detection, definitely not feature detection, it's OS detection - the system responds differently when only the OS in the UA string is altered.

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

#342

Post by emodendroket »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #336
emodendroket wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Should be testable, for example what optimisations are in the FF48 code sent to Windows that breaks FF48 on Linux? MS will I'm sure provide those details to demonstrate their lack of malice. /s

If you're that hot and bothered about it try fetching a page with both UAs.

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

#343

Post by emodendroket »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #302
lighthazard wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's a solution, it's not a simple one. Developers don't have this luxury. Choosing an OS to support means supporting all the APIs and possible ecosystem that comes with it.

But they're not supporting an OS, but a browser here. If it works in Firefox on Windows, there's no technical reason for it not to work the same way in Firefox on Linux.

Yeah there's no reason at all that anything would work differently in one browser or another, signed, a guy who has never done Web development.

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

#344

Post by emodendroket »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #330
JshWright wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This obviously means foul play. No, it really doesn't. It could just as likely mean they load a bunch of slow polyfills and workarounds when the browser is not part of a whitelist (assuming it won't have support for various APIs that it actually does support).

I struggle to consider that Microsoft is really that inept as to only be able to design it that well. I mean, do they do any testing at all? Across the browsers and platforms accessing their sites? Seriously, white-listing?? I don't buy it.

It seems most likely that they do testing on exactly the browsers and operating systems they say they support and no other platforms and do not want to expand the list because they'd have to provision more environments and do more testing.

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

#345

Post by emodendroket »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #341
WaxProlix wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That commenter appears not to have heard of browser detection or UA sniffing, it has nothing to do with feature detection, they're a completely different method (and paradigm). Nor should browser detection cause Firefox to follow a different switch in the code when on a different OS, not since about version 2 when I think there were bugs making that useful. Really browser detection was something needed to handle MSIE…

What he's saying is that they're using UA sniffing in place of feature detection (which is frowned upon these days but was common at one point).

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

#346

Post by FLUX-YOU »

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.…

>This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.

Not us. If a user comes to us with a crusty-ass Dell with its own localized food chain of insects and our site doesn't work on IE5, they'll wake us up at 2am to tell us that.

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

#347

Post by bastawhiz »

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.…

I have to say, the Microsoft folks involved in anything driver-related have been the most competent, down-to-earth, and underappreciated folks at the company. If you're a Microsoft driver person reading this, props to you my friend.

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

#348

Post by bubblethink »

gkya wrote: post #329
Piskvorrr wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades old. The GWX consent brouhaha is decades old? Edge (not IE) becoming the default browser all by itself is decades old? Riiiiiiiight. Decades of consistent data, methinks.

I really don't get why they can't put the browser they like as the defaultone into their OS. Not that I'm an MS apologetic (I don't really use anything MS since time immemorial) but it seems silly to me, frankly.

I think it has a habit of changing itself to default even after the user sets something else as the default. Minor annoyance though compared to the overall pain of using a windows machine.

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

#349

Post by wernercd »

jacquesm wrote: post #340
cortesoft wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what the people you are responding to are saying. The client makes a request to the server, and the server either returns the new optimized client code if the user agent is one that it knows supports the new code, or it sends back the older, slower, client code for an unknown user agent. They are probably returning the older code because they KNOW it works, even if slower, while they aren't sure if th…

So, you're telling me Microsoft is unable to tell the difference between code that doesn't work (the 'old' code) and code that does work (the 'new' code), and that to be safe they are returning the non-working code as a fix for potential problems that do not appear to exist? If there is anything that would be more damaging to Microsoft than calling them malicious it is probably calling them incompetent, that's their…

Of course MS is unable to tell the difference between code that works and code that doesn't... on an unsupported platform.

Incompetent? "MS: We support Platform X, Y, Z." ... "Mob: MS must be malicious or incompetent because they aren't testing and pushing new code to Platform 9 3/4"

Unsupported. Means exactly that.

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

#350

Post by gurkendoktor »

smhenderson wrote: post #273
mamon wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You can remove IE in Windows 7: http://lifehacker.com/5164286/windows-7-lets-you-finally-uni...

I'm pretty sure I've seen the dialog in Windows 10 as well, but not for Edge, which I find even worse than IE.

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