Hacker News Reader

Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

Do these guys run integration tests of any kind? Makes it easy to assume malice in breaking fundamental features.

> integration tests of any kind

No!

Microsoft famously fired their entire QA team. Also… their technical writing team. And then they outsourced both support and the bulk of their development to India.

You get what you pay for, and right now Microsoft is variously paying either zero or very little.

I'd see Microsoft hiring contractors, but do they outsource product development to external companies ?

Not sure about development, but Azure support is almost entire outsourced.

It's double outsourced even. They outsource to Accenture who then outsources it to small companies.

It's really really annoying because these people get penalised for escalating and they don't know much more than what it says in the docs. I read those before contacting them and it's always a hassle to get my case through to real support. They'll stall forever asking for more logs and more tests. I feel like I'm on trial defending that I really have a problem. Not a valued customer.

And mind you, this is already meant to be the "premium" support tier.

At this point I think it's par for the course. There must be some support tiers where you'll get actual Microsoft employees deal with your issues (I don't think Apple's devs get a random contractor reading a script when they report server issues), but short of that I would feel lucky to even get a human to look at the question.

Now that you mention malice, here's a smoking gun, from the linked bug report:

> (it's not an issue with Firefox's implementation. This can be demonstrated by spoofing the useragent as a Chromium-based browser and attempting the same login flow […]).

How is that a smoking gun indicating malice?

Because it is not a bug or mistake in the code but a deliberate loss in functionality based only on the name of the browser.

It means that the website doesn't work in Firefox intentionally. The website was proframmed to not work with Firefox user agent string.

Is firefox blacklisted or are chrome and edge whitelisted?

Ah I see, I thought the parent poster meant malice on the part of Mozilla, got confused by bouncing between comment threads. I could see malice, since it is Microsoft, but what's the "why" of it? I don't really see any motivation that M$ would have to block Mozilla, all it's going to do is piss off users. It's not like people are gonna get fed up and switch to Edge, they'll get fed up and switch to Chrome. If anything, M$ has a great incentive to improve Firefox adoption. The market that uses FF is the same market that is never going to choose Edge. FF and Edge both have a much better position if they can damage Chrome's market share.

The cynic in me says we will understand the motivation in some antitrust trial one of these years.

Changing behavior based on user agent is necessarily intentional on the part of Microsoft.

That check lies somewhere along the line between "having the direct goal of breaking authentication flow (pure malice)" and "is a completely legitimate programming error (pure incompetence)."

I am not ready to assume pure incompetence (and here's where I might be wrong).

File an FTC complaint. This is potentially anti competitive behavior with a digital paper trail. Microsoft will ignore randos, so engage a regulator. Include the bugzilla post link in the complaint.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

Microsoft and uncompetitive behavior? No way!

Same thing goes with your state's AG and Microsoft's AG.

Smoking gun is a leaked memo indicating the behavior is meant to break Firefox in this specific way

I don't think this is a smoking gun at all, because we don't know the story of why the difference in behavior was implemented. What not-infrequently happens is that Firefox is late to add support for some new web standard, so sites gate their usage on the user agent (which indicates that they actually bothered to test on Firefox!), and then it takes time for them to get around to removing the check after Firefox adds support.

In fact it's not completely unlikely that that is what happened here. Firefox still has incomplete support for the web authentication API [1], and in particular FIDO2 devices did not work if a PIN is set until Firefox 114 - only a few months ago! I'm not sure if this could be related, but Firefox also still does not support passkeys [2], so I'm sure someone will get blamed for anti-competitive behavior for that at some point.

[1] https://caniuse.com/webauthn

[2] https://caniuse.com/passkeys

That's a plausible explanation.

If Microsoft solves the issue within the next 30 days, I will consider that you were right.

"30 days" is an arbitrary extension of the timeline for something that was reported 4 months ago to Microsoft, and should have been already fixed.

Random stuff breaking or things not working quite right is to be expected with Microsoft products.

Office 365 Calendar broke for me a few weeks back and is still unusable. It forcibly leaps me weeks ahead whenever I try to scroll to today’s date. I literally cannot view my work calendar on my phone anymore.

I often wonder if they’re even capable of knowing there’s an issue.

Microsoft devs have a reputation of being quite sub par.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com