Xbox Cloud throttles performance if user agent is Linux
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> I think this is because of android. Android is based on Linux and identifies as Linux in a browser. android on xcloud is limited to 720p. I don't think this is intentional but just a bug they didn't think through.
Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS.
I mean, it definitely is, but you also have to admit that it's very in-character for Microsoft to intentionally break stuff, just to push their own software.
MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly.
Chrome works as well. With their browser essentially being a reskinned version of it, I guess even they considered it to be too unbelievable if they claimed that video calls couldn't be done in it.
Unless you have some imagination, in which case you can explain a hypothetical or a possible truth.
> So you're just assuming they're innocent
The post you are responding to does not really suggest innocence overall, just perhaps they are guilty of something else (laziness or incompetence) in this instance and perhaps that they are covering that up.
The companies you worked for published their own browsers?
User B: "What if it's just them being cheap or incompetent?"... no evidence of this behavior either
Asshole take: "You MS Apologist! Quit making excuses for them" ... no evidence of this behavior either
So many companies mistake "support" for "support". You can have software that supports platform X without providing technical support for it when run on platform X. Commercial software companies tend to confuse these two very different meanings of support.
But it's likely just statistics as you said. Somebody made the genius move to say "we don't want to spend time testing a browser with 5-10% market share". Which of course it makes sense to MBAs but they are missing so much other nuance.
So, if things are working mostly, and you're intentionally not fixing the trivial problems, then you have bad intentions either directly or indirectly.
I actually forgot that Teams has audio and video. You are right about testing those two, I don't have a good idea for that either. I would probably look into using a virtual cam, like OBS implemented one, and then just check the footage on the other end?
But honestly, Firefox usually just works.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Yes, video and screenshare works but audio does not. I have never succeed on that in Linux. Some component is missing.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you to get it working, though.
As side note, I only use Firefox Developer edition, but I doubt they have significant differences on this matter.
You need to install correct xdg-portal. Chromium also requires specific flag before WebRTC works.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#xdg-desktop-portal...
It’s not that people dreamt about Microsoft edge pop up when people tried to download chrome, also I assume they have someone with android and Linux since they planned to run android apps and they worked on wsl 1/2 on Windows
But yeah if we want to say that Microsoft is victim and we’re all delusional then go on
Most people just copy other's opinion about it being bad because they like to hate on stuff.
Microsoft used up all its credit by abusing its power, tech, and goodwill of its users over the years.
They also did it again with VSCode by close-sourcing more parts of it.
There's no reason to think that Microsoft did it unintentionally.
The burden of proof is theirs.
I think anyone who's paid attention to Microsoft over the past 20 years could tell you that they're out of the game these days. Hell, if you still don't believe me, go look at their revenue share. Windows, Xbox, Office... all of that plays second-fiddle to Azure now. Without Linux, Microsoft couldn't deliver the same first-rate cloud experience as AWS. Without Linux, WSL doesn't exist on Windows. Microsoft has realized that their role in this play is to sell thick-clients and let servers do what servers do best, there's pretty much nothing I've seen in the past 10 years that would suggest ongoing hostility towards Linux users from Microsoft. Maybe that dotnet hotloading fiasco was the worst thing? As someone who wouldn't touch dotnet anyways, I don't really care how good it's Linux tooling is.
Microsoft is trying to kill Linux desktop and lock it to server rooms, because the server side is a lost cause, but the desktop side is not. They just want Windows based games to work on other systems, so they can market Windows as compatible with that "other" games, and enable Linux under Windows so they can say "Hey, you don't need to install that, it works under Windows, too". Even more so, they can completely lock PC platform starting Win11 and onward and tell antitrust regulators that all the software already works under Windows, anyway.
They wanted to inject Mono/C# into GNOME and Linux so they can make the whole desktop dependent on themselves, but that backfired spectacularly. So this is their new tactic.
Microsoft has a DNA, and this DNA is in action with full force. They didn't change, and they won't change, ever.
Oh, maybe they can extort some money by suing DXVK in the future, who knows.
We're seeing all EEE cycle, again.
Also, if you had the same point of view, you could have written the same thing.
BTW, I was already using Linux by 2002. I have pretty much first hand experience of what Microsoft did until today.
Nadella is just a person. It can't steer a behemoth of a corporation going on the same path for at least 30 years, with a DNA planted by its founder and built upon "acquiring" other people's source code and being "inspired" by others' ideas.
On the other hand, I just see Nadella as a softer talking version of Ballmer. He's just acting soft, but threading the same path with same insistence and rigor of Ballmer.
I don't trust Microsoft as a corporation, period. Their current ambitions and actions only reinforce the image I have in my mind which is formed by experience. This is a strong opinion, firmly held. I don't swing it around to hit people with it, but kindly show them whenever need arises.
Lastly, Why is it so frowned upon to not like a company in a non-violent way and voice one's opinion?
Nono it's fine I guess - it's just that a companys culture forms from top down. Granted, if Nadella is just Ballmer in Nadella clohing, then this doesnt hold up, but that would also validate the argument that Ballmer was just a Gates in Ballmer clothing.
The board chooses the CEO, the CEO is the top authority in the company. He sets the tone. There is no "Windows team" anymore, were going full in on Azure and Linux. Its simply a different time.
I see Gates as the reference point and the pioneer: Halloween documents and all that. Strangle market.
Ballmer: Double down on Windows, developers, EEE, tell them as overtly as possible. Strangle people, developers and software.
Nadella: Be soft, be friendly, pin down developer ecosystem, take away what makes Linux magical and embed into Windows ecosystem, make Linux irrelevant so it's not a threat anymore.
They're trying to do the same things in a different manner.
Microsoft is Microsoft. They make great hardware. I pay for Office license, and buy upgrades for family computers, yet I won't lend them my sins for a second.
I'm not one of these guys who hates Microsoft, because it's cool. I was using their keyboards and mice for a long time, and actively recommended them (still do, actually), but when it comes to playing nice with open source, haha, that's not existent. Let's not kid ourselves.
Yeah but this isn't just a "dumb mistake".
It's been widely discussed in the web design world how terrible of an idea it is to use the user agent for basically anything at all for literally decades now. There are web designers working now who were not born when this problem was first discussed. It's not a "oops I didn't know about this recent change" thing, it's a "doing this has been known to be a bad idea for so long there are obsolete books that talk about it".
The reason browser user agents are the disaster area they are today is entirely because bad web programmers have been abusing the user agent in ways they shouldn't be for so long.
On all my various devices, linux gpu performance was worse, than with stock windows. But I never shopped for specific linux supported devices, which is the only known way to me, to get comparable results.
As someone who only has Linux systems and games often, my big barriers are not performance related; they're Anti-Cheat related.
So to suggest that this is the source of Microsoft's decision making is laughable.
[1]: https://youtu.be/aE5WyObAFtk
[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rtx3090-...
Also why should my 1080p (or greater) phone be limited to 720p anyway?
I don't know why they can't cross check to see if you're on wifi or mobile data before restricting you, though.
humm… I wonder why is that..
I'm still hoping for the unlikely Gamepass + Steam Deck combo, but I'm not holding my breath.
They just ignore concerns from QA (for example, regarding competitors). Google does this. Microsoft does this.
The days of active malfeasance are gone with Windows 3.1 and its DR-DOS fake glitches (on Win 3.1 beta, toggled off on final).
Also let's not forget the shenanigans that Google pulls with ad words auctions etc.. If a person would have a history of doing things like that we'd call them dodgy or criminal, but when a company does it we somehow are to believe it's all accidents?
QA won't test on another browser or if it does its results are ignored? So they don't make it work badly on purpose, just by negligence.
Regarding to believe it's all accidents, I don't affirm it's on purpose as to not attract shills, paid or otherwise.
All these large American companies are extremely anticompetitive. That’s been the case since the US stopped seriously enforcing its own laws on competition and will remain so until a regulator seriously slaps them. Europe is trying on the most egregious things but they are still not hitting hard enough.
You might be negligent and don’t water your plants when needed, but they will die at the end.
However it’s not your fault because you didn’t intend on killing them, right?
On the second case you were trying to kill the plants.
That's great.
Maybe we should try that.
Thank you.
Maybe we both should increase our flexibility in different perspectives.
Thank you, too.
:)
Well, if you really wish to go that far we can do a philosophy doctorate. Find me on Libera.chat, nick qa6.
Now if that takes away a bit of freedom and privacy, well, you can still opt out on any device that could run Windows 11, and use another OS instead.
I'm wondering whether this won't be possible later down the line, though, given the trend.
Furthermore, since Windows is so prevalent, you're gonna have an hard time using something else. Given you're neither tech savvy, or rich, which most people aren't.
So no, there are no excuses for a company this large to have such malpractices, we're talking about a private company with more power than many small nations.
The issue would be to discern between honourable and dishonourable (or shameless) entities, but there starts the domain of concessions to convenience, and PR.
If supposed world class developers working for a trillion dollar company identify Android as linux, then yeah, we should excuse them like they are a small indie company working on their first big week end project
No big deal, move on
I find it funny, white knights defending microsoft NO MATTER WHAT
Very funny, almost sad, a tiny bit
Same can be said for all companies. Just because they are large doesn't make them composed entirely of competence or even excellence.
Linux often doesn’t come with non-free codecs installed, these are often optional extras, even if many people install them.
They will simply cover up their shady practices by saying "it was for codec checking" whereas they are also crippling the experience for Linux users.
Given that there are some very talented programmers out there who know what they are exactly doing, it's hard to believe that it's incompetence.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand, https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
Random Web Front End Developer is not frequently going to be that person. And Person Who Managed All The Media Encodings is probably not likely to be working on the web front end.
Most likely scenario is the front end dev will get a chunk of JSON from the media encoding dev describing the media, and then be left to their own devices to figure out how to translate that into something the Media Capabilities API will understand.
Consistent results across browsers is also really difficult to achieve. Chrome in particular is super pedantic about the content type field. Firefox sometimes ignores parts of the content type field. It's nuts.
It's an especially awful argument when switching the user-agent makes the problem disappear.
"Forgive the multi-billion dollar conglomerate with a vested interest in user capture; they probably just don't employ the proper people" is a very weak argument on something like this.
I mean, Apple makes even more money than MS, and they don't seem to know the first thing about online media codecs and cross-platform API sniffing. So... yes? Even as someone who uses Linux as their daily-driver, there's pretty much no way for me to get mad at Microsoft for what's pretty obviously a mistake (and not even a serious one at that). Microsoft is a hostile company, but that's not a reason to make their molehills into mountains for them. I seriously doubt a any of the outraged commentors on this page are typing their comment from a real Linux box anyways. They're more incensed by the opportunity to hate Microsoft than they are by the actual problem.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, you need to know what the exact content type is for your media, both container and codec. With video, you also need to check the audio at the same time. And there isn't any documentation on the exact format that it's expecting.
It's a gigantic mess. You can't just give it a media stream and ask it "can you play this". It's often easier to just attempt to play the media and wait to see if it errors (which it can still do after even a few frames of playback succeed).
If the rumors about timed exclusives for the new Bethesda games are true, too, they’ll have lost all goodwill.
Oh, I need a link for that. definitely not a fan of their java changes, but I haven't heard about them trying to force users to use bedrock.
Who exactly are they losing goodwill from?
This behavior is normal in the console market, but not common in the PC market at all.
"X sucks too!" is very rarely any kind of a defense at all. What does that have to do with Microsoft's behavior?
If you excuse bad behavior because there's a WhatAbout distraction, no criticism of anything will ever be valid.
I'm not sure Microsoft is deliberately making things worse for Linux users, either, but the fact that a better implementation is both possible and straightforward enough suggests that cross-platform performance is not quite the priority that marketing materials make it out to be. We're not talking rocket science here. If this is indeed not specifically about Linux, then either Xbox Cloud's code review practices are at best questionable, or the paradigm that best describes their approach to client-side performance is #yolo.
Also remember that Xcloud is still beta, with a feedback form after every session, and probably some telemetry. While it would technically not be rocket science to detect codecs, I'm more inclined to think that this is a blanket denylist because enough reports have come up and showed that using better codecs/higher quality produced a subpar experience even though codecs are reported as supported (which might come from a zillion reasons such as codecs falling back to software decoding, or underpowered hardware, and both could be true for PC, Chromebooks, and Android).
The game streaming use case seems to be very different from general purpose video streaming: it's realtime, is not efficiently compressed (due to the realtime nature + tight latency budgets during encoding), and changes rapidly unlike the main other use of realtime video streaming (video calls). So if software decoding is fine for watching Netflix or making a Zoom call, this is different.
Browsers have APIs for detecting codec support, but I don't think there's anything for detecting hardware accelerated video decoding. But given Chrome on Linux doesn't support this on any hardware, it's a pretty decent heuristic.
My guess is that they are just lazily using User-agent as a proxy for codec detection. I don't think there is a reason to jump to a malicious intent here (even with existing priors).
https://slashdot.org/story/03/02/06/1645229/microsoft-sends-...
https://www.theregister.com/2003/02/06/msn_deliberately_brea...
I wonder how easy to manipulate threads here? Cause it seems it wouldn't take much that effort.
They couldn't help themselves, they just had to abuse the trust and now I am back to the point were Microsoft has to earn any trust that I am not forced to give them.
Take note whoever thought it was a good idea to squeeze a few cents extra out of us by plastering cheap candy crush ads everywhere in my licensed professional software, change pricing willy nilly and be generally unreliable with stuff like the post above: it does backfire.
Other engineers and "evangelists" and what not worked hard for years to create trust and become a preferred choice. I was swayed. I preferred Microsoft to Google for a few months. You tore it down in hours and now I despise both.
(Yes, there are usable parts of both. But no long time trust. Always check my back. It works but it is so icky to be in a relationship with someone who so cleary doesn't care.)
Also they have reasons ($$$) besides tracking and advertising to keep me in their ecosystem.
It won't surprise me much if they start double dipping though, so I keep an eye on fairphones etc.
Additionally, both of the previous two comments are based on false equivalence[2]. The two technologies discussed (online certificate checking, and file hash detection) are not the same, nor do they affect the user's privacy in remotely the same way.
I would argue this thread has devolved into misinformation stemming from uneducated claims.
1. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/15/apple-nixes-csam-refere...
Think of the children!™
And I was thinking I'll watch The Boys in nice quality on official streaming service, turned out I had to cancel Prime and download 2160p torrent. I'm still puzzling what DRM solves, in most cases it pushes me into torrenting.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/xbox-cloud-gaming-...
Microsoft didn't do that. You must be confused.
I don't know how to test this scientifically, but if I change my user agent on Windows to Linux, will that lower the bitrate and make my sometimes slow experience better?
You can confirm it yourself in a minute or two. Just open Xbox Cloud and switch your user agent.