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

answers.microsoft.com

141–150 of 492 posts

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

#141
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.

Why does a web app care about my OS?

"Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".

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

#142
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.

That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.

I agree that other things might be possible, but looking a the history, assuming malice is a reasonable starting point with microsoft. It has been right many times in the past.

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

#143
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like how Netflix monitors torrents to find out how popular movies/shows are, Wait what? Really?? What are they monitoring, seed ratios from trackers? That's an interesting/novel way of researching demand-makes sense given the service Netflix provides.

I don't know if they're still doing it. But they were in 2013. http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/how-netflix-uses-piracy...

Oh goodness the irony on this page

"SEE ALSO: Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ Falls Prey to Piracy"

Still, that's a very interesting and out of the box method of thinking by the Netflix team. Definitely want to try and find out more about this; thanks for bringing this up!

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).

yeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that

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

#145
post #37
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.

I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here. If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support…

But it's not a support problem since clearly just changing the ua makes it faster. It has nothing to do with linux. Somebody hardcoded it.

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

#147

And this, along with MS' history, is why I still have a hard time using any of their technology. I appreciate some of their open source efforts, but for the most part they're still the same old. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

That and I use it for ten minutes and realize that myself and the designers/builders of the software live in different worlds.

Why? Why? Why? Who would do it like this? fuckit back to linux

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

#149
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> depending on user agent (UA) This would be very amateurish. The right way to do it is to check browser capabilities. User agents can be easily manipulated and are considered unreliable.

And not every browser bug is detectable via feature detection. I've seen plenty of render specific bugs that were only able to be targeted via user agent parsing. Not it isn't perfect... but it's often the better of the options available.

I'd really love to see what their excuse is.

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

#150
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. People forget that they're _actively_ appearing to break it by using this UA detection. No company should _ever_ use user-agents for feature detection, because user agents themselves are screwy in so many ways [0]. Honestly, I feel like this was someone actively deciding to break the system on Linux (or any unrecognised UA). Wouldn't any reasonable developer just send back a fully-featured page if they couldn't…

UA "detection" is an unworkable mess (i.e. a bad idea) when it's trying to differentiate between different consumer web browsers. But UA detection works just fine when it's only trying to differentiate between browsers as a whole, and things that are not browsers—like web spiders, or curl(1), or your native client app. I have a feeling that this is the latter case. The detection code was likely written to give a high…

Doesn't giving web crawlers different pages than the user facing UI get you kicked out of search engine indexes? The original ticket indicated different pages were served, not just QOS.
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