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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)

#421

Post by Qwertious »

Symbiote wrote: post #295
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.

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

According to the stack exchange official stats that were on the frontpage yesterday, over 30% of developers run Linux Desktop. That's not "a small minority" by any means.

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

#422

Post by bostand »

rasengan0 wrote: post #418
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.…

That was funny but sadly many of us are stuck in MS shops. I even got folks to vote on community features/issues so basic with other cloud providers. This is a more realistic timeline, note the 2015 - 2017 duration: https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/sugges... I think the lesson is get the issue up in HN for a company to start noticing.

A university I know just switched from Google to Microsoft exchange and sharepoint.

Many angry employees (many on Linux) are now using their private Gmail accounts since the Microsoft web interfaces are very slow and buggy.

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

#423

Post by greenzebra »

annnnd wrote: post #417
iliketosleep wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This! As a Linux user I don't really care if someone is neglecting my platform of choice or purposefully sabotaging it, I'll just move on in any case. Not performing testing on Linux is inexcusable in my book in this day and age. It seems like a bad idea to check for capabilities by parsing user agent string anyway - I though we all figured that out about 20 years ago? JavaScript allows web page to check for capabili…

I am curious how @annnd detects whether link prefetching is supported by a browser in js on-the-fly (reliably and in a performant way) http://caniuse.com/#feat=link-rel-prefetch. There are many capabilities you can quickly detect, but for that one I can't think of a performant way. Test your solution with Safari on a Mac, which should return false.

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

#424

Post by wyaeld »

ebang4 wrote: post #410
i336_ wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

Edgar, you might be interested to know there are significant problems with the big javascript files being downloaded on Linux for Office365, particularly for WordOnline.

We've done similar experiments and proven it to be again based on your own user-agent detection, since normally they will take 30-60 seconds to load, causing the UI to essentially lock up and fail, when faking the agent-user to something else will work around it.

Multiple attempts at contacting Microsoft support come back with its not supported.

Its the Web... pretty sure you can build things without breaking them for Linux.

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

#425

Post by dfcowell »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #174
TuringTest wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It keeps growing > 36 people found this helpful Also: > Solved my problem (12)

I went to vote for this, just for the fun of it, but got asked to login. Then it asked me to setup my username, and then complained that my 3 usual variants were already taken. I guess I have another account that's already sitting on that username. But who knows? Microsoft's multi-user login support is a disaster. One of my accounts is corporate, and my browsers -- ALL of them on ALL OS's -- are constantly confused.…

I've lost track of the number of times I've been stuck in a login/redirect loop with Google's multiple account handling when I want to use one of their services from one of my secondary accounts. Only way out of it is to clear cookies and log in again with the account I want, then add the other 4-5 accounts until the problem happens again.

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

#426

Post by deadbunny »

annnnd wrote: post #417
iliketosleep wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This! As a Linux user I don't really care if someone is neglecting my platform of choice or purposefully sabotaging it, I'll just move on in any case. Not performing testing on Linux is inexcusable in my book in this day and age. It seems like a bad idea to check for capabilities by parsing user agent string anyway - I though we all figured that out about 20 years ago? JavaScript allows web page to check for capabili…

> I'll just move on in any case.

Unfortunately not all of us have that option. I'm currently trying to figure out an issue with TFS which means I can't do anything with a PR once it's been raised if I use a browser in Linux. After seeing this thread I think I'll be switching the user agent and see if that fixes it.

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

#427

Post by josteink »

annnnd wrote: post #417
iliketosleep wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This! As a Linux user I don't really care if someone is neglecting my platform of choice or purposefully sabotaging it, I'll just move on in any case. Not performing testing on Linux is inexcusable in my book in this day and age. It seems like a bad idea to check for capabilities by parsing user agent string anyway - I though we all figured that out about 20 years ago? JavaScript allows web page to check for capabili…

> It seems like a bad idea to check for capabilities by parsing user agent string anyway

In theory yes. But for some cases it's just not realistic to do feature-detection, and then you move on to the second best option you have.

I'm pretty sure we'll have user-agent related bugs for quite a time to come.

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

#428

Post by i336_ »

wyaeld wrote: post #424
ebang4 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

Edgar, you might be interested to know there are significant problems with the big javascript files being downloaded on Linux for Office365, particularly for WordOnline. We've done similar experiments and proven it to be again based on your own user-agent detection, since normally they will take 30-60 seconds to load, causing the UI to essentially lock up and fail, when faking the agent-user to something else will wo…

(Not ebang4)

That's interesting; sounds like a very similar issue to this one (with Link Prefetching). That said, Edgar is from OneDrive, whereas you're talking about Office365. My guess is that the departments are "just far apart/different enough," so to speak, even though the issue does sound the same.

I really liked to hear that "We will definitely ensure that more Linux testing is done!"; hopefully this is a collective mindset (and I really do hope that, non-skeptically). Maybe if you're persistent now you might get somewhere - although it could take a while; the L1 techs on the forums or wherever are probably not completely tuned into these recent developments.

You could also try being unorthodox, such as for example politely poking random people on GitHub/microsoft (fish emails out of local repo clones :P) - that might find you someone who can figure out a good next hop in the direction of the right department, eg someone might be able to pass your email on to some developer directly. That's always really cool.

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

#429

Post by fnord123 »

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 –…

You are within your rights to give the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is also within their rights to get in front of this and show that "Microsoft Loves Linux" on the client side as well as the server side by addressing the issue instead of saying "well, just use Windows and it will work".

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

#430

Post by Sir_Substance »

EpicEng wrote: post #376
Sir_Substance wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to lie. Under these circumstances, I often say to the people reporting it very directly "That's not a supported use-case, but I will make sure the relevant people know anyway". I then go and let the person who owns that product know. Half the time, they say "that's not a supported usecase and it's a pain to change, so it's not happening". The other half of the time, they shrug and say "Put a ticket in,…

Sure... But we're talking platform support here, not some corner case no one thought about during design.

No, we're not. Read the statement again. If you fuck with the headers, you get a totally different and much higher performance result _on linux_.

The charitable hypothesis someone else raised is that there's a bug in how onedrive handles unknown user agents. Neither you nor I have any idea how much effort that will take to fix. You'd hope not a lot but you should never make assumptions about another man's stack. But if it is low effort to fix, Microsoft could get a small land-slide of partial compatibility with one change, which is good PR even if they don't officially support the platforms. It's definitely worth asking nicely rather than giving up and moping about it.

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