I'd have much more respect for them if they just came clean and said "we hate linux users, if you want to use that OS don't use our products because we try our best to make them not work on linux". Look at what they did with Skype for example. At least then we'd know not to try their stuff.
This has nothing to do with 'making it run well on platforms you care about' but it is 'making it run bad on platforms you don't care about'.
It takes more code for the software to act in this way (this is what proves this is intentional and not accidental), and more support to boot.
That's not necessarily true. For example they might be doing polyfills that are slower than the native windows implementation.
I feel like I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thinking everywhere. The canonical example for me is lately is "he voted for Trump/Hillary therefore he must support groping/war/whatever".
I wish people would ease up on these kinds of deduction-based motivation attribution. It's my view that there enough self-professed unethical motivations for us to work against, without speculating. The speculation just muddies the waters.
The same exact website/piece of software runs better by saying "Hi I'm on windows". This obviously means foul play.
No, it really doesn't. It could just as likely mean they load a bunch of slow polyfills and workarounds when the browser is not part of a whitelist (assuming it won't have support for various APIs that it actually does support).
Seriously, white-listing??
I don't buy it.
It is _less_ effort to say "We support these specific platforms, and rather than doing actual feature detection, we'll just load a bunch of polyfills to make it work on anything else".
Have you ever used Microsoft software?
If 1990s Microsoft did something seemingly anti-competitive, it probably was intentionally anti-competitive. If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.
Ok
> If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.
That's fine with me. But the degree to which MS has abused its monopoly position in the past, the degree to which they have been found guilty of bribery (in very recent times) in order to push MS products where Linux would have been a viable (and more sensible) alternative (for instance: http://www.intellinews.com/former-romanian-minister-admits-t... , there are plenty of other examples), the Windows 10 privacy violations, the crippling of Skype on Linux and so on make me believe that there are still at least some parts of MS that have not changed all that much.
It takes a long time for a company to recover from a toxic management team even after they are gone. Some never do.
Their fall from the heights since then has allowed me to ignore whatever malfeasance they committed in the late 2000's or early 2010's, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen.
And for what it is worth, what they did to companies I worked for in the late 90's and early 2000's consisted of lying, cheating and stealing. It consisted of blatantly dishonest and illegal behavior. And it was completely institutionalized so that the default behavior was dishonest and malicious.
You can be wonderfully forgiving and credulous, but I personally find it very hard to do so.
From former employees, I know that the culture at that time and into the late 90's was that Microsoft employees were a better class of human being than non-employees. Knowing that, it's not surprising to see the amount of Us vs Them behavior that showed up as anything from active antagonism to malicious neglect.
The kids don't remember that time frame, and wonder why the old farts malign Microsoft. It's because they went out of their way to make malice look like incompetence. That sort of malignancy deserves not to be forgotten.
It's as if your kids only know Uncle Phil as a Born-Again Christian but you still remember him as a raging alcoholic and how Aunt Sue always had a black eye, or as the guy who molested you when you were a kid. Are you just supposed to forget that ever happened? You accept his apology (except MICROSOFT NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZED), enjoy him while you can but you still have to be on guard in case he falls off the wagon.
1) Windows is still closed source, their OpenDocument support is broken, and Secure Boot gives them an amount of power incomparable to anyone else in the industry: https://nudgedelastic.band/2016/01/i-am-still-not-buying-the...
2) DirectX 12 is Windows Store exclusive and it will never be possible to use DX12 apps on e.g. Wine: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...
3) Patents: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3042699/open-source-tools/m... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2841412/open-source-softwar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890580
Of course, all of these things are legal.
Here's a quote from the /r/linux thread [1], courtesy of /u/angellus:
> This is certainly a bug. It is not a targeted attacked against Linux users. Report it to Microsoft. Microsoft is just doing really shitty feature detection using User Agent strings instead of, well actual feature detection. I was able to reproduce the same result by setting my User Agent to Firefox 52 on Windows 98. If I set it to a "more realistic" user agent like IE 7 on Windows XP, it would actually redirect me to a busted page to upgrade my browser instead of Word Online. It appears if Microsoft cannot figure out your User Agent (including your OS as part of it), it gives you a busted experience.
1 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...
Nor should browser detection cause Firefox to follow a different switch in the code when on a different OS, not since about version 2 when I think there were bugs making that useful.
Really browser detection was something needed to handle MSIE way back in the day, or possibly other browsers before web fonts.
But this ain't browser detection, definitely not feature detection, it's OS detection - the system responds differently when only the OS in the UA string is altered.
If it works in Firefox on Windows, there's no technical reason for it not to work the same way in Firefox on Linux.
Well, Microsoft has a long history of "making things buggy" everywhere else to create lock-ins. This instance may not be strictly related, but people's attitude has been shaped by years of anti-competitive stuff that MS has pulled.
It makes sense if they want the default browser to require user confirmation to change. But setting it to Edge in the meantime? That's just being rude and anti-customer.
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.
I don't think this is a conspiracy, but I don't think the characterization that users think that because OneDrive works on Windows better than Linux, buggy by inaction is assumed to be buggy by action: this situation is far more damning than that.
The client makes a request to the server, and the server either returns the new optimized client code if the user agent is one that it knows supports the new code, or it sends back the older, slower, client code for an unknown user agent.
They are probably returning the older code because they KNOW it works, even if slower, while they aren't sure if the new code works or not on other machines. The author says it works fine on linux when getting the windows response, but we can't be sure he has tested every use case; maybe it fails under particular conditions, which is why they are still returning the old code. Or, perhaps, they just haven't tested it so they go with the safe thing, which is to return the older code.
If there is anything that would be more damaging to Microsoft than calling them malicious it is probably calling them incompetent, that's their core expertise you are challenging there.
Incompetent? "MS: We support Platform X, Y, Z." ... "Mob: MS must be malicious or incompetent because they aren't testing and pushing new code to Platform 9 3/4"
Unsupported. Means exactly that.
A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days.
Either you support a platform outright, you send out the same code to everybody or you disable the platform completely. Other options are sufficiently gray to count as ways to coerce people into making a platform switch, and the MS rep seems to be pushing in exactly that direction.
" For the best experience, we recommend the operating system listed in this article. "
Right.
If you know browser X, Y and Z support HTML5 video - because that's your actively supported platforms... but someone says I'm browser 6... do you push HTML5 video? Or do you fall back to stuff you know works but is years old tech?
If you don't know what Browser 6 is... then you have 2 options: Safe options or Feature Detection.
Safe option: I don't know if you can read HTML5... so I'm going to serve you HTML like it's 1999.
Feature Detection: I'm going to go out of my way to see if you can support random new technologies that I'm using. Can use HTML5? You can? Oh... Here's your scripts... or... You can't? Here's HTML like it's 1999.
The first option is a lot easier. "Unknown? You get 'Safe' tech that's not shiny, optimized or best-of-breed. Known? You get stuff we said we support on platforms we say we support".
Second option requires testing and blending the technology stack based on detected features. Possible - because plenty of people do it - but it's definitely not as easy to support dozens of techs in many many more possible combinations.
It looks like MS took Door #1.
Are you saying you would ship HTML5 code to platforms you don't know support HTML5? Because... that sounds like a recipe to send "broken" code to users because "everything should work the same everywhere" which is something that happens... never.
No, I would stick to open standards supported by the vast majority of users until the next wave was supported by the vast majority of users and so on. I would never detect a user agent and make crippling decisions based on the response.
And if you do decide to resort to such trickery then you'd better make sure that you extract the maximum out of each platform that presents itself otherwise you open yourself up to claims of favoritism.
As for the HTML5 video, given that I've pioneered that stuff and worked very hard to keep the video-on-the-web scene plug-in free and working with all browsers it was with serious reluctance that I eventually switched to H.264 encoded video with flash as the player because to me that was the wrong way to go about it but the market literally demanded it.
I suspect that if we had not had flash a proper <video> tag would have been implemented ages ago.
MS will I'm sure provide those details to demonstrate their lack of malice. /s
I think MS is nearly a decade ahead of you there.
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.