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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

One thing that Microsoft always messes up (especially with its acquisitions) is the Login. Microsoft apps have the worst login flows I've seen - not only is it inconsistent across sites, it is also slow often requiring many redirects.

It may be just me, but the Login experience is an essential one for me.

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Yep, Microsoft login experience has been getting worse over the years.

The current one I go through for Office 365 is like this:

  - type in email, click "next"
  - wait for next page to load
  - type in password, click "next"
  - wait for next page to load
  - 2FA, click "next"
  - wait for next page to load
  - click "next"

You forgot the subsequent:

    - redirect, blank screen
    - redirect, blank screen
    - redirect, blank screen
    - redirect, blank screen

Well we all wanted "OAuth", "OIDC" and other related stuff...for privacy! Now we wonder why chat apps can't interoperate, we have walled gardens, Google's killing the open web, and numerous other dysfunctional things going on on the internet that I can't enumerate fully without making it all sound like baseless rambling.

Exactly. Whoever came up with that design couldn’t be more ignorant.

Reminds me of Elon's quote "product errors reflect organizational errors"

They're probably hoping you'll just have to do that once in your lifetime, then as they aquire or embrace, extend and extinguish all competitors you're forever logged in to everything you'll ever need to be.

Same with google. And gmail has the nerve to ask me if I want the HTML version - every single time.

That first redirect send users to correct URL for login, “ballmer@corp.contoso.com” might have to go “server23.auth.contoso-logins.com” and that first next button works like a mini search engine to make that work.

Perhaps the most contributing factor that kicked off the chains of event that resulted in the mess of that chain of the event is that sometimes the “domain” part of RADIUS or other authentication servers(called “realms”) don’t resolve, because they aren’t FQDN, in the same way com.companyname.myapp1 never is. On top of that, you would want to be able to log in with non-matching realms in ID, such as ballmer1@microsoft.com on contoso.com, so it’s always just a long String with at signs and dots with no discoverability anyway.

Thanks for explaining it.

It's however still annoying and could use a better design.

Let's not forget the wonderful "we've logged you out, you can close this tab" which doesn't have a way to log back in, without re-opening the link. The flow you mentioned is similar for Google, though, and it's annoying there as well, but at least there you just get asked to type your password/2fa again when your session expires and you can get back to what you were doing.

They still beat the Sony Playstation login experience, which just flat out doesnt even (or didnt for the longest time) work on desktop Safari. Or if you use Chrome, you get infinte Captachas

Anyone remember Microsoft Passport?

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