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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)

#401

Post by ebang4 »

Hi everyone, this is Edgar from the OneDrive team. We know that some users may have experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. The issue was resolved as of Tue, March 22nd 3pm PST.

We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms (iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows), but for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue. Rest assured that this was not intentional. It was an oversight.

The prefetching optimization was disabled, and it will be enabled again soon after an update for StaticLoad.aspx has been tested on Linux and released.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

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

#403

Post by kalleboo »

sah2ed wrote: post #282
dragonwriter wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's​ behavior was illegal not because of bundling alone, but because of bundling a product (IE) in a different market with a product which was a monopoly (Windows) in what was held to be (based on additional Al evidence beyond mere bundling) an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize a different market. So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox…

Honest question: if Microsoft didn't bundle IE and the user hadn't received a copy of those ubiquitous AOL CD-ROMs which came in the mail/magazines (and sometimes carried the Netscape Navigator installer), how is the user expected to consume content on the web without a web browser? Surely, you'll at least need a decent web browser to get online to download a different browser of your choice, no?

Every ISP I used in the 90's sent a floppy or CD-ROM with a setup guide, web browser and some other shareware internet tools (FTP clients, Stuffit Expander on the Mac, etc)

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

#404

Post by iliketosleep »

ebang4 wrote: post #401

Hi everyone, this is Edgar from the OneDrive team. We know that some users may have experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. The issue was resolved as of Tue, March 22nd 3pm PST. We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms (iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows),…

Kudos for fixing the issue. I do question whether it was originally tested throughly on Linux in the first place, otherwise it's hard to see how such a major bug could have crept in.

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

#405

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

fdupoo wrote: post #396
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just isn't true (and I worked on Chakra while at Microsoft). I think you're thinking of J++ (Microsoft's version of Java, not JavaScript). Now JScript (Microsoft's version of ECMAScript) does have some minor differences in the dialect, but that was only because the ECMA standard was at a standstill back then. Mozilla had no problems extending their implementation to match either.

Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?

They're just extensions in the same way that GCC has its own extensions for C and C++.

J++ was created to counter shortcomings in the design of early Java language versions that Sun was not keen to re-integrate back into the Java language. That itself isn't bad (as other JVM-compatible languages exist, like Scala and Groovy) except that J++ then needed Microsoft's own Java VM with its own platform-specific runtime extensions - and that's what the Sun lawsuit was about. I agree it was badly handled by Microsoft, and in the end Microsoft just ditched Java and reinvented J++ as C# and the .NET Framework - which is where we are today.

As for JScript: before JavaScript was standardised there were extensions being added by everyone (Netscape had their own, as did Microsoft). I think Microsoft extended JScript in a very conservative way: the main change is the addition of the `new ActiveXObject` wrapper for COM objects which made AJAX possible, and also made JScript useful for automating Windows (and server-side JavaScript with ASP/JScript predates Node.js by 13 years!) - to my knowledge JScript itself didn't add any syntactical changes and provided you didn't use ActiveXObject your code would run without issue in other JavaScript engines. Note that this isn't the same thing as DOM extensions in Internet Explorer, of which there were many.

I think it's worth pointing out that when IE6 was released in 2001 it was by-far, the most W3C-compliant web-browser in existence: for CSS2.1, Netscape's then compliance level was abyssal, and even beating out Opera at the time too.

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

#406

Post by [deleted] »

fdupoo wrote: post #395
skissane wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 –…

U should modify your language to sound like less of an apologist. Apologists are less effective when they are easily spotted as such. ;-)

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by i336_ »

ebang4 wrote: post #401

Hi everyone, this is Edgar from the OneDrive team. We know that some users may have experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. The issue was resolved as of Tue, March 22nd 3pm PST. We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms (iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows),…

Thanks for popping in here to clarify this personally, thanks very much for the imminent Linux-specific fix, and thanks for the clarification that this was an oversight :)

I'm curious about the "less efficient technique" you referred to. Insight into the technical context around the goal being achieved may be very interesting to other Web developers looking to make their JavaScript applications more efficient and responsive.

A lot of people are also likely to be very interested to learn what solution you use to fix this for Linux as well.

--

As an aside, link prefetching caught my eye - it's an interesting mechanism that works via or tag, or via HTTP headers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...

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

#408

Post by Dylan16807 »

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.

For a while I was changing my browser back and forth between firefox versions. Every single time windows 10 would detect that change and 'protect' me from it by opening the default programs control panel and setting the default browser to Edge.

It makes sense if they want the default browser to require user confirmation to change. But setting it to Edge in the meantime? That's just being rude and anti-customer.

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

#410

Post by ebang4 »

i336_ wrote: post #407
ebang4 wrote: post #401

Hi everyone, this is Edgar from the OneDrive team. We know that some users may have experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. The issue was resolved as of Tue, March 22nd 3pm PST. We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms (iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows),…

Thanks for popping in here to clarify this personally, thanks very much for the imminent Linux-specific fix, and thanks for the clarification that this was an oversight :) I'm curious about the "less efficient technique" you referred to. Insight into the technical context around the goal being achieved may be very interesting to other Web developers looking to make their JavaScript applications more efficient and res…

i336, hello from Redmond!

With less efficient technique, I refer to using , , tags to prefetch content, which does not have the goodness of link prefetching mentioned in the article your shared. That is what Chrome on Linux was falling back to.

Link Prefetching is the way to go, and that is what Chrome on (Mac/Windows/Chrome OS) is currently using.

The reason why browser detection is needed is because it is not supported everywhere, e.g for instance, according to http://caniuse.com/#feat=link-rel-prefetch Safari does not support it, so StaticLoad.aspx uses the , , technique, but unlike Chrome on Linux, Safari on Mac does not hang.

Again, this was not intentional. The second technique does not hang on Safari on Mac, but it does on Chrome on Linux. We will definitely ensure that more Linux testing is done! Our goal in OneDrive is to build a service that enables as many people as possible to be productive, so if in cases it looks like we are trying to favor our own OS, that is not really our intention.

Thanks! Edgar

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