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

But if you still insist you need it, I don't think detection should be that difficult. When user comes to the page for the first time you put a hidden link somewhere with prefetch turned on. Then you ask server if the page has been accessed. And because you only make this check once (for instance on login page while the user is typing) it is performant enough.

Is it easier to whitelist? Sure. But we have seen here how reliable whitelisting is.

The percentage between $PLATFORM users generally and $PLATFORM users using your product may or may be not correlated. It may happen, that then first percentage will rise but the second will not - you are making it difficult for them, so why bother - and you will miss it.

You might fix the software later, but that's the easy part. The more difficult part is to fix your reputation and users habits. They already have opinion of you and found alternatives that work for them. The Thank you, I go back to Google Apps suite. response is a perfect example of this.

That's interesting; sounds like a very similar issue to this one (with Link Prefetching). That said, Edgar is from OneDrive, whereas you're talking about Office365. My guess is that the departments are "just far apart/different enough," so to speak, even though the issue does sound the same.

I really liked to hear that "We will definitely ensure that more Linux testing is done!"; hopefully this is a collective mindset (and I really do hope that, non-skeptically). Maybe if you're persistent now you might get somewhere - although it could take a while; the L1 techs on the forums or wherever are probably not completely tuned into these recent developments.

You could also try being unorthodox, such as for example politely poking random people on GitHub/microsoft (fish emails out of local repo clones :P) - that might find you someone who can figure out a good next hop in the direction of the right department, eg someone might be able to pass your email on to some developer directly. That's always really cool.

Other products (e.g. Teams, Office itself) are also affected for the same reason, and spoofing user agents to just officeapps.live.com works around the issue on all of them.

Regardless of your browser, it'll heat your system up so you can fry an egg or broil a steak.

They are most likely doing the 'put no effort in to make it not buggy' action, and it just appears that they are doing it on purpose.

J++ was created to counter shortcomings in the design of early Java language versions that Sun was not keen to re-integrate back into the Java language. That itself isn't bad (as other JVM-compatible languages exist, like Scala and Groovy) except that J++ then needed Microsoft's own Java VM with its own platform-specific runtime extensions - and that's what the Sun lawsuit was about. I agree it was badly handled by Microsoft, and in the end Microsoft just ditched Java and reinvented J++ as C# and the .NET Framework - which is where we are today.

As for JScript: before JavaScript was standardised there were extensions being added by everyone (Netscape had their own, as did Microsoft). I think Microsoft extended JScript in a very conservative way: the main change is the addition of the `new ActiveXObject` wrapper for COM objects which made AJAX possible, and also made JScript useful for automating Windows (and server-side JavaScript with ASP/JScript predates Node.js by 13 years!) - to my knowledge JScript itself didn't add any syntactical changes and provided you didn't use ActiveXObject your code would run without issue in other JavaScript engines. Note that this isn't the same thing as DOM extensions in Internet Explorer, of which there were many.

I think it's worth pointing out that when IE6 was released in 2001 it was by-far, the most W3C-compliant web-browser in existence: for CSS2.1, Netscape's then compliance level was abyssal, and even beating out Opera at the time too.

So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox or Chromium, since none of those distributions have a monopoly to leverage to start with.

False. See, for instance, Arch.

[1] Although admittedly the last real work I did in Windows was 7, so please correct me if the situation has changed.

The short version is that the actions of a non-monopolist are looked at very differently than the actions of a monopolist.

Additionally, you're dead wrong about "every Linux distribution", and even if you weren't, the fact that there are many of them would moot an antitrust argument.

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.

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.)

Wrong.

There are plenty of bugs that cannot be detected using feature detection, especially with events and <input> elements. Sometimes you can find a browser-agnostic workaround, but sometimes the only solution is to sniff the browser.

It is especially necessary if you need to support "obsolete" browsers that your customers still use.

It is important to really try and avoid browser sniffing when "fixing" bugs in current versions of browsers (since your "fix" is likely to break in future versions).

Note, feature detection usually implies that you are using JavaScript.

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.

Not knowing the code behind it, but knowing the history of the OneDrive for Business client, I could see a few ways this could happen. The OD4B client has gone through a bunch of iterations before being merged with the regular (public) OneDrive client, so along the way, there could have been optimizations added on that were only available to the new merged client. Due to constraints, this could have been done using a simple UA check. These optimizations could have been merged down to the OSX/Linux clients (not sure if they're using a merged one there, or still the separate ones) but since different teams work on the clients (most likely different teams on each client) and server, the Linux client team never told the server team that the it also supports these optimizations.

Easily could see the above scenario happening, it's not completely crazy when talking about big companies that teams don't have the best insight into eachother's work.

Disclaimer: Work on Microsoft. Not on Windows, not on OneDrive, completely different part of the company.

There is no reason with the modern setups that entirely different UI pages need to be sent based on user agent detection. Every best practice I have read says to detect for features, and fall back to something more general when a feature isn't present. Clearly that is not happening here, and that little bit of technical incompetence is enough room to slide in a few hundred mb/s of transfers for certain targets.

Microsoft has a long history of pretending to play and throwing curveballs. All the way back to Dr DOS. Their run in with the DOJ was just one time they got caught. They are even doing stuff now with CPU detection and not providing windows updates to people with and older but still "supported" OS and a newer CPU. Just because they won't let it go, they are still patent trolling android handset manufacturers.

Why do we think microsoft has changed for the better?

My guess is that they whitelist javascript or other things based on specific browser strings.

Onedrive for Business is a real shitshow product. IMO, the people supporting it scramble to make it perform at all.

Also, the percentage of desktops running Linux is still tiny relative to Windows. The last time I saw any numbers (about two or three years back), it was ~90% Windows, ~7.5% OS X, ~1.5% Linux, so there is little incentive for Microsoft to care about Linux desktops.

I disagree. When I call support I'm not looking to commiserate or share my misfortune. I'm looking for acknowledgement of and resolution to a problem.

This view that empathy is what's important is the reason why hold messages say "your call is important to us" and why all customer support feigns empathy to my emotional plight when I call them about anything.

Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old.

I often just scope my google search.

Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for.

In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.

I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense...

On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single instance where the builtin help system has actually helped me. I mean, even MS-freaking-DOS had a reasonably useful builtin help.

With Linux, at least it gets better once you get the hang of it. Microsoft's sorry excuse for documentation is (mostly) a joke. (The exception are developer tools - the documentation on T-SQL and the .Net framework classes is fairly good, even though it's such a mess that it's easier to Google for specific entries than using the TOC or the builtin search... once I find what I was looking for, I do usually find a helpful answer to my question.)

(To be fair, when I first started using Linux, I found it incredibly strange, complicated, confusing and intimidating; within the first six months of using Linux, I was this close to literally throwing my PC out the window on no less than three occasions. So I know the frustration you speak of.)

True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

You just have to be tricky: People will not help you, but as pedantic as they are, they’ll correct mistakes you make.

You go there, and say "I’m disappointed that you can’t even use <device> with Linux" and you’ll get hundreds of answers telling you exactly how to use it.

source: I got trolled by swedes in #linux before abandoning that wasteland for greener pastures listed above.

Seriously, it can't be that hard to call the NT equivalent of strerror(3) when formatting these messages.

I'm trying to explain that as long as Microsoft's incentives align with making Windows dominant, they're going to engage in behaviors to make it happen, including things like artificially slowing connections from non-Windows machines.

Instead of saying "MS is releasing stuff open-source, they must be having a change of heart", we should say "MS believes that opening this as open-source is the best way to ensure Windows' continued dominance". That's what I'm trying to highlight.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

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.

resolve_renderer_module(user_agent.os)

where the osx/Windows ones are already loaded in RAM, but it has to try (and fail) to load the linux one every time somebody tries.

This is classic Hanlon's razor stuff.

I wonder what happens in Windows 10 with a user agent mimicking a Linux environment. Does the site slow down? If so, the support bot can't brush it off since it's a supported operating system.