I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt in my mind here but this is a tough one to explain away.
Stopped giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt in 1999, never regreted it.
Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
41–50 of 492 posts
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#42I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt in my mind here but this is a tough one to explain away.
Maybe they're injecting a brazillion polyfills if it's not a known user-agent?
100MB? Assuming they're using GZIP, that's normally a 10% compression ratio, leading to about 1GB of actual data. Let's assume this data is stored as 8 bits, that's about one hundred million characters of code! Maybe what they're doing is downloading the entirety of Windows XP (roughly a gig in size), running it in JavaScript and then rendering the page in Internet Explorer within their version of XP.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read in a comment on Reddit (lost the link at the moment), that it doesn't appear to be nefarious. Basically, they're trying to do feature detection based on UA instead of.. actual feature detection.
Google is also doing this with Universal 2nd Factor working on Chrome but not on Firefox (which supports U2F with an addon). Can't tell if this is intentional though.
Plenty of parts of Google have done UA-sniffing all over the place. Opera, even after being Chromium based, have had plenty of problems as a result: the UA doesn't match so therefore they get an "unsupported" or "degraded" experience.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no direct understanding but I have a hypothesis; - different generated html / js depending on user agent (UA) - bug fixes are rolled out on a UA by UA basis - bug fixes have been rolled out for Windows and Mac (supported) - but not for the "generic" HTML / JS output If this is true it will mean that anything other than the supported platforms will fall further behind as time goes by.
That sounds highly likely. Intentional throttling doesn't help Microsoft in this case. I don't think they view Linux desktops (aside from Chromebooks) as a serious threat. Why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users?
A company has an IT director who upon review has determined that Linux workstations would be acceptable for some of his users now due to the fact he uses onedrive.
He tests this solution, finds it slow and decides to stick with Microsoft.
This is probably a happy accident but one they won't move quickly to fix.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
But user-agent parsing should be blazing fast, a one-liner regexp or similar, isn't it?
That was sarcasm
I don't think so, I think the person was utilising Hanlons razor[0]:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no direct understanding but I have a hypothesis; - different generated html / js depending on user agent (UA) - bug fixes are rolled out on a UA by UA basis - bug fixes have been rolled out for Windows and Mac (supported) - but not for the "generic" HTML / JS output If this is true it will mean that anything other than the supported platforms will fall further behind as time goes by.
That sounds highly likely. Intentional throttling doesn't help Microsoft in this case. I don't think they view Linux desktops (aside from Chromebooks) as a serious threat. Why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users?
Throttling does help if they can get away with it. Now where did I put my windows phone...
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no direct understanding but I have a hypothesis; - different generated html / js depending on user agent (UA) - bug fixes are rolled out on a UA by UA basis - bug fixes have been rolled out for Windows and Mac (supported) - but not for the "generic" HTML / JS output If this is true it will mean that anything other than the supported platforms will fall further behind as time goes by.
That sounds highly likely. Intentional throttling doesn't help Microsoft in this case. I don't think they view Linux desktops (aside from Chromebooks) as a serious threat. Why wouldn't they want more OneDrive users?
Throttling does help if they can get away with it. Now where did I put my windows phone...
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they're injecting a brazillion polyfills if it's not a known user-agent?
Yet, it works as expected without the polyfills.
Right. But he's suggesting that if they don't recognize the browser that they inject as much polyfills as they can so everything works no matter what.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#49Unhelpful 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…
Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#50Unhelpful 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.
"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.
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.