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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)

#111

Post by cookiecaper »

ht85 wrote: post #72
nkkollaw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to giv…

I very much doubt this was intentional. If this was a small company targeting unsavvy users to try and upsell them something, sure. In this case the payout might be worth the fallout once people inevitably figure it out. In this case, I doubt someone thought "hey, let's mess with Linux users and serve them a bunch of garbage, it'll encourage them to move to Windows".

The only reason I would hesitate to say it's intentional is Microsoft's relationship/experience with the DOJ. Maybe that's far enough in the past and the landscape has changed sufficiently that it's no longer a matter of concern for them.

If the only change necessary to improve speed is to update a string in the UA, I would say that's pretty hard to do accidentally. In theory, it could be an artifact of some internal QoS systems that prioritize requests from Windows boxes without the explicit intent of damaging the experience of non-Windows users, but that seems like a stretch. It'd be interesting to know if Mac UAs experienced similar slowdowns or not.

It's much more likely that Microsoft is interested in doing what they can to make sure that people feel "things just work better on Windows", and little limitations or breakages like this are the perfect way to do that. Windows is Microsoft's bread and butter and they haven't forgotten that.

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

#112

Post by NoGravitas »

jklinger410 wrote: post #59

Onedrive is an embarrassingly subpar product for Msoft to be pushing anyway. I can't think of a single worthwhile use-case?

Use case: your company uses Office 365, and you want your cloud storage to be integrated with the rest of the Office 365 apps, and you don't otherwise care about the quality of the cloud storage app.

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

#113

Post by soundwave106 »

ohitsdom wrote: post #39
ainiriand wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But user-agent parsing should be blazing fast, a one-liner regexp or similar, isn't it?

The user-agent parsing is fast, it's the server-side rendering logic specific to Linux user-agents that is somehow terribly slow.

Anecdotal experience... but when I use Chrome and switch user agents to a random one that probably wouldn't be too common (in my case, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; OpenBSD i386) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36), in Chrome Network tools it seems that there were several Javascript pages that were being loaded through a "StaticLoad.aspx" (namely WordEditor.js and Hermes.js scripts), that simply hung while downloading.

Changing the version didn't seem to matter (I couldn't find the latest one for any Linux style OS easily, but I tried "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; OpenBSD i386) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36" with the same results). However, Android type user agent strings like "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; Galaxy Nexus Build/IMM76B) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.133 Mobile Safari/535.19" load fine.

Not knowing the code I have no idea what this could mean, but I suspect you're 100% right here, there's some server side rendering that does different things based on user agents, and it's having trouble on the "other UA" category for some reason.

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

#117

Post by DonHopkins »

yread wrote: post #34
mhluongo wrote: post #2

They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right? I thought this was the New Microsoft. Any other hypotheses?

Well obviously they're trying to prevent the year of linux desktop.

They're still trying to get even for Marc Andreessen sabotaging NCSA Mosaic's cross-system portability stuff, in an attempt to prevent the year of the Windows Web Browser.

https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic/blob/fd11fb7c900e8...

  Much of the cross-system portability stuff has been intentionally
  REMOVED from this version of the library by Marc A in order to
  discourage attempts to make "easy" ports of Mosaic for X to non-Unix
  platforms.  The library needs to be rewritten from the ground up; in
  the meantime, Unix is *all* we support or intend to support with
  this set of source code.
And of course for this remark:

https://ontechnologyandmedia.com/2009/07/12/the-return-of-th...

Netscape co-founder Mark Andreessen boasted that Netscape would reduce Microsoft Windows to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers.”

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

#118

Post by chiph »

plgs wrote: post #68
nkkollaw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to giv…

"thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.

Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Microsoft could tabulate these reports to find what OS their customers want to use with OneDrive. But if they don't get recorded, there's no info to learn that from.

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

#119

Post by frik »

anonymous_iam wrote: post #16

This is not a new thing. Decades ago when Verizon contracted with Microsoft to "upgrade" their web portal, it was no longer usable from any browser other than IE. I had been using it from Netscape on various SPARC machines and from my mobile device (PalmOS). The web page html source had no exotic platform specific language elements. It was obviously a "business decision". I wrote the VP at Verizon a letter pointing o…

The same with Sharepoint 2003 and Outlook WebApp 2003. Microsoft did a lot of things during the browser wars. Then later in Balmer era Microsoft was very soft and a rather good citizen, but since 2012 they changed back to Bill Gates style flavoured with indian spice.

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

#120

Post by easytiger »

adsfqwop wrote: post #100
morinted wrote: post #9

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

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.

As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.
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