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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)

#371

Post by emodendroket »

jacquesm wrote: post #366
emodendroket wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I completely disagree that not being able to use the software at all is better than a degraded experience and I can remember at one point Linux users railing against exactly what you're now advocating.

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

#372

Post by emodendroket »

jacquesm wrote: post #369
JshWright wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How thoroughly do you figure that guy posting the question tested it compared to whatever QA process MS does for supported platforms?

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

#373

Post by hinkley »

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 –…

Steve Ballmer was in charge of Microsoft a little over three years ago. Do you think he's the only executive left over from the 90's?

It takes a long time for a company to recover from a toxic management team even after they are gone. Some never do.

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

#374

Post by NamTaf »

angry_octet wrote: post #324
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.…

I hear this phrase "It didn't make business sense" all the time. It's a persistent misunderstanding of business and customer relationships. You support Linux users (or Mac or WinXP or those behind a firewall or MSI installer needing etc etc) because you want to dominate your competitors, you want your product to be the one everyone wants, and the one with the least bugs. If you're going to say 'screw you' to some cus…

At a company the size of MS that is not a CTO level decision by any stretch unless it is a broad-based 'all-in' or 'all-out' decision to steer the company at a high level. It's much lower than that and it almost certainly is based on an assessment of competing priorities.

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

#375

Post by emodendroket »

hrktb wrote: post #326
kayoone wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, people seem to forgive Apple a lot of similar practices.

Microsoft was not just 'borderline unethical', it got charged times and times for severe illegal practices. Apple is far from there (yet ?)

The stuff Apple does on iOS is worse than the worst of the Windows lockin. The difference is a DOJ that is not interested in monopoly cases.

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

#376

Post by EpicEng »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #62
EpicEng wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... Just lie? This isn't going anywhere, the platform isn't supported. I'm pretty sure the powers that be remembered that Linux was a thing when they made that decision.

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.

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

#377

Post by foxylad »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #155
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.…

It may be funny, but at the same time it's great to see this kind of feedback directly from the customers to the company. If someone listens up there, sooner or later they'll realize there is more money in the subscription business than in one-time OS purchases, and they will put the money where the mouth is.

More money - and mindshare (=future money).

Chromebooks run linux, and if this issue affects those, then O365 is looking terrible against Gsuite for huge numbers of school students. In five years, those students will be starting their working lives demanding Gsuite.

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

#378

Post by rossy »

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.…

Having a list of supported browsers is fine. All modern browsers are supposed to implement the same web standards, but they all have a different set of supported features and subtle rendering and layout bugs. Sniffing the User-Agent string to detect the browser is a small evil, but it's sometimes necessary.

Having a list of supported operating-systems is totally different. For a web app, this is almost never okay. The popular cross-platform browsers (Chrom{e,ium} and Firefox) are excellent examples of well designed cross-platform software. They both abstract the underlying platform and implement the layout engine in platform-independent code. It's very rare to find a rendering bug in these browsers that only affects a single platform. So, what I don't understand is why OneDrive is sending different code to Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, and why are the support team being instructed to dismiss bug reports from Linux users when they are using a browser that would be supported on Windows? It's hard not to attribute this to malice. Even perpetuating the idea that it's not possible to write truly cross-platform software or that web apps have compatibility with specific operating systems works in Microsoft's favour, since they sell the most popular desktop operating system.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

foxylad wrote: post #377
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be funny, but at the same time it's great to see this kind of feedback directly from the customers to the company. If someone listens up there, sooner or later they'll realize there is more money in the subscription business than in one-time OS purchases, and they will put the money where the mouth is.

More money - and mindshare (=future money). Chromebooks run linux, and if this issue affects those, then O365 is looking terrible against Gsuite for huge numbers of school students. In five years, those students will be starting their working lives demanding Gsuite.

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by dang »

frik wrote: post #119
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.

> since 2012 they changed back to Bill Gates style flavoured with indian spice

That's a slur. If you do this again we will ban you.

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