Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

answers.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 492 posts

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

#361

Post by emodendroket »

jacquesm wrote: post #352
wernercd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, from where I'm sitting a server should just do what it does for everybody without shipping different code to 'unsupported platforms' in order to make those platforms work worse. It either serves up the same to everybody or it contains code to support some platforms and blocks others. A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days. Either you support a platform outright, you send…

Please. If they displayed a page saying "sorry, Linux isn't supported; try using a supported platform instead" you'd be over here taking them to task for that.

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

#362

Post by flukus »

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.…

> It just didn't make business sense.

I've seen this time and time again and every time the sum "linux" bug ends up affecting some browser/OS combination that is supported. It's not breaking because it's linux, it's breaking because there's a bug and sooner or later it will rear it's head elsewhere.

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

#363

Post by hinkley »

fnord123 wrote: post #312
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…

Microsoft has a history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

And that is merely one of the most documented cases.

From former employees, I know that the culture at that time and into the late 90's was that Microsoft employees were a better class of human being than non-employees. Knowing that, it's not surprising to see the amount of Us vs Them behavior that showed up as anything from active antagonism to malicious neglect.

The kids don't remember that time frame, and wonder why the old farts malign Microsoft. It's because they went out of their way to make malice look like incompetence. That sort of malignancy deserves not to be forgotten.

It's as if your kids only know Uncle Phil as a Born-Again Christian but you still remember him as a raging alcoholic and how Aunt Sue always had a black eye, or as the guy who molested you when you were a kid. Are you just supposed to forget that ever happened? You accept his apology (except MICROSOFT NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZED), enjoy him while you can but you still have to be on guard in case he falls off the wagon.

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

#364

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by wernercd »

jacquesm wrote: post #352
wernercd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, from where I'm sitting a server should just do what it does for everybody without shipping different code to 'unsupported platforms' in order to make those platforms work worse. It either serves up the same to everybody or it contains code to support some platforms and blocks others. A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days. Either you support a platform outright, you send…

Well not all platforms are created equal... it's why you have fall-backs to "Stable but not shiny" for platforms you don't support... or platforms you don't know supports New Shiney Thing (tm).

If you know browser X, Y and Z support HTML5 video - because that's your actively supported platforms... but someone says I'm browser 6... do you push HTML5 video? Or do you fall back to stuff you know works but is years old tech?

If you don't know what Browser 6 is... then you have 2 options: Safe options or Feature Detection.

Safe option: I don't know if you can read HTML5... so I'm going to serve you HTML like it's 1999.

Feature Detection: I'm going to go out of my way to see if you can support random new technologies that I'm using. Can use HTML5? You can? Oh... Here's your scripts... or... You can't? Here's HTML like it's 1999.

The first option is a lot easier. "Unknown? You get 'Safe' tech that's not shiny, optimized or best-of-breed. Known? You get stuff we said we support on platforms we say we support".

Second option requires testing and blending the technology stack based on detected features. Possible - because plenty of people do it - but it's definitely not as easy to support dozens of techs in many many more possible combinations.

It looks like MS took Door #1.

Are you saying you would ship HTML5 code to platforms you don't know support HTML5? Because... that sounds like a recipe to send "broken" code to users because "everything should work the same everywhere" which is something that happens... never.

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

#366

Post by jacquesm »

emodendroket wrote: post #361
jacquesm wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from where I'm sitting a server should just do what it does for everybody without shipping different code to 'unsupported platforms' in order to make those platforms work worse. It either serves up the same to everybody or it contains code to support some platforms and blocks others. A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days. Either you support a platform outright, you send…

Please. If they displayed a page saying "sorry, Linux isn't supported; try using a supported platform instead" you'd be over here taking them to task for that.

Actually, I would not. MS is under no obligation to support anything other than their own platforms. But if it works it should work well rather than be effectively cripple-ware.

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

#367

Post by jacquesm »

wernercd wrote: post #365
jacquesm wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from where I'm sitting a server should just do what it does for everybody without shipping different code to 'unsupported platforms' in order to make those platforms work worse. It either serves up the same to everybody or it contains code to support some platforms and blocks others. A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days. Either you support a platform outright, you send…

Well not all platforms are created equal... it's why you have fall-backs to "Stable but not shiny" for platforms you don't support... or platforms you don't know supports New Shiney Thing (tm). If you know browser X, Y and Z support HTML5 video - because that's your actively supported platforms... but someone says I'm browser 6... do you push HTML5 video? Or do you fall back to stuff you know works but is years old t…

> Are you saying you would ship HTML5 code to platforms you don't know support HTML5?

No, I would stick to open standards supported by the vast majority of users until the next wave was supported by the vast majority of users and so on. I would never detect a user agent and make crippling decisions based on the response.

And if you do decide to resort to such trickery then you'd better make sure that you extract the maximum out of each platform that presents itself otherwise you open yourself up to claims of favoritism.

As for the HTML5 video, given that I've pioneered that stuff and worked very hard to keep the video-on-the-web scene plug-in free and working with all browsers it was with serious reluctance that I eventually switched to H.264 encoded video with flash as the player because to me that was the wrong way to go about it but the market literally demanded it.

I suspect that if we had not had flash a proper tag would have been implemented ages ago.

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

#368

Post by jacquesm »

skissane wrote: post #360
fnord123 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

You are talking about something Microsoft did in the early 1990s. It is very likely that most or even all of the people involved don't work for Microsoft any more. No company is ever going to be perfect, but I honestly believe that today's Microsoft is a much better corporate citizen than 1990s Microsoft was. (And, with the AARD code, while they shipped it turned on in the beta, it was disabled in the final release –…

> If 1990s Microsoft did something seemingly anti-competitive, it probably was intentionally anti-competitive.

Ok

> If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.

That's fine with me. But the degree to which MS has abused its monopoly position in the past, the degree to which they have been found guilty of bribery (in very recent times) in order to push MS products where Linux would have been a viable (and more sensible) alternative (for instance: http://www.intellinews.com/former-romanian-minister-admits-t... , there are plenty of other examples), the Windows 10 privacy violations, the crippling of Skype on Linux and so on make me believe that there are still at least some parts of MS that have not changed all that much.

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

#369

Post by jacquesm »

JshWright wrote: post #358
jacquesm wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd buy that if it sent out the exact same code that it would without that UA. But it doesn't.

What don't you buy? They test with a certain set of supported platforms. If a client isn't one of those (whitelisted) platforms, then they may send out a bunch of inefficient polyfills so they know XYZ functionality exists, even if it's slow.

Except that it works just fine if those 'unsupported' platforms are treated in the exact same way as the supported ones. To make it seem as if a whole pile of work was done in order to make unsupported platforms work less well but this is a good thing is something that I find very hard to reconcile. And if this were a company that did not have a history of exactly such tricks it might be more believable, MS - with me at least - does definitely not have the benefit of the doubt in cases like these.
Post reply on HN