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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's login experience has been generally broken for years. Multiple redirects through different domains. Heck it uses Javascript redirects. In 2017. So your back button won't work. And it has a habit of just not working. I went to visit a public page on docs.microsoft.com and wound up dead on a white page on login.live.com because it decided I needed to be redirected to login. Just to view a docs page.

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I don't know if this is still the case, but you couldn't login if you had 3rd party cookies disabled. Somewhere in the authentication phase, it would silently fail. No error message like incorrect username/password. You'd get kicked back to the login screen as if you just got there. It was a hassle trying to find exactly which cookies were necessary.

What is the alternative to javascript redirecting when you can't do it as the http response?

It spits out an HTML page with no body that solely does a Javascript redirect. Put it in the http response.

It is even worse if you work for a large company with Office 365 that uses your organizations domain for authentication. I think there are about 6 redirects to get logged in. Even worse than that, they made us create a "personal" account with the exact same username for accessing MSDN because it wasn't compatible with our SSO at the time. So every time I log in, I have to type in my username, wait for the redirect, then choose personal account, wait for redirect, etc...

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