The business that Microsoft alienated in this exchange probably comprised around 3% of the people who were using OneDrive on purpose.
more like .3
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)
#82[deleted]
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#83Unhelpful 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…
Remember when browsers were supposed to untether you from the OS? How is operating system support at all involved for a web-based application?
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That doesn't sound right at all. It's been a number of years since I have been at MS, but any engineering team I worked on would have wanted this feedback and fixed the problem. Not supported officially doesn't mean a dev can't spend an hour on a likely simple fix to help a customer - depending on who saw this feedback there are certainly many devs at MS who would fix this without even being asked. I'm willing to bet…
I was fortunate to participate in a bug fix driven by MS (for the Tedious sql adapter for node), and it was impressive. The issue was noticed by someone who worked on Azure (not Azure SQL), who upstreamed the report to appropriate people in the SQL teams who then dug in and found that there was something that wasn't being set right in the tedious adapter.
It wasn't an MS product, or supported, and they still took the time to help. I'd be surprised if one didn't find similar responsiveness from at least some of the o365 developers. More often than not, something is "unsupported" not because it doesn't or shouldn't work, but because it doesn't have the dedicated testing resources and in case there is an edge case bug that would be excessively costly to fix (ex: dealing with stupid flexbox issues with the current version of Safari on mac).
In any case, it doesn't matter, the response was a bad, canned response that doesn't take into account the troubleshooting the person reporting it already did.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#85All hail the "new" Microsoft, still using the old anticompetitive tricks from the DOS era.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#86Earlier 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.
It can always be passed on. The 'tech team' may say 'wontfix' because it's unsupported, but it's very clearly a bug that could bite them on 'supported' systems in the future as user-agent sniffing is notoriously unreliable.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.
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 higher QOS priority to direct browser access, and a lower QOS priority to the native OneDrive sync service built into Windows (because it happens in the background.) But in doing so, they probably made the check ask the wrong question—"is this a browser" instead of "is this our client"—and thus wrote the check with a browser whitelist pattern (that was never tested outside of UA strings from browsers on Windows), rather than a blacklist pattern (their one sync-service UA.)
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#88This 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…
Behold the "new" Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.
Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#89I 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 keeps growing
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Re: Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)
#90They can't be throttling based on user-agent... right? I thought this was the New Microsoft. Any other hypotheses?
It is the "new" Microsoft, in terms of PR. Kind of like AT&T's "Gigabit to the press release." Tons of positive press for the announcement, but nothing real behind it.