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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing.

It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX and/or use the built-in editor. The documents are beautiful, Overleaf doesn't miss a beat and we are very happy with their solution.

Microsoft should be ashamed - I don't know how anybody would ever consider using them for any serious production work.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5216132/...

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I am a social worker and SharePoint is unfortunately widely used by nonprofit agencies for storing client records. It's a real shame, but they can't afford anything better.

Why not use a file server and/or a simple database, even a CRM database (there must be FOSS ones)? What do you mean by "client records"?

Some of it will be about reliability, i.e. the office burns down and Microsoft still hold a copy. Some of it will be about having a third-party that is "trusted" handle the most dangerous part - security. If SharePoint gets compromised there is plausible deniability that "we did everything we should do".

I know for example that some companies will hire subcontractors for high risk parts of a project, just so that there is somebody to blame if anything goes wrong.

Not defending Microsoft in any way but my guess of what's happening:

* Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care

* Your organization is too small for them to care

Firefox is the only browser other than Chrome (and derivatives) on their OS. The web is supposed to be multi-platform. I guess it isn’t that surprising that modern MS is happy to just live in Google’s ecosystem though.

if they will lose data when you're on a rarely used browser, can you really trust them not to lose data in general?

"yes, your car exploded, but you were driving on a dirt drive way. it works just fine on the highway"

> * Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care

It's pretty much the majority of their Linux users. Firefox is often the default browser on many distros due to the Chrome/Chromium data sharing concern.

> * Your organization is too small for them to care

Then why even have a business tier if not for the support?

The result of Microsoft's current stance is simply that users look elsewhere. I mentioned Overleaf, but Google Docs is also a solid choice. For local editing we are using LibreOffice.

> It's pretty much the majority of their Linux users.

Sure, but for heavy users of office 365, how many use Linux to begin with?

That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question...

>Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

> That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question...

I remember years ago there was a browser demo, some kind of game I think, that would only be played on Internet Explorer. If you changed your User Agent string to be Internet Explorer, the demo would work entirely without issue. I think this was prior to Microsoft getting a large fine for not offering other browser choices.

> >Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

That is a difficult to parse sentence. "may" indicates uncertainty about the claim about to be made. "have no enough resources" seems to indicate that there is not enough engineering time available. "about the Linux environment" seems to indicate that it is a knowledge gap. Very strange.

> teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX

How did that go? :)

It's one of those semantic riddles. Because, once they know LaTeX they aren't non-tech anymore. :)

Far easier than it sounds. Essentially the advice was "copy something else that does what you want, and if you run into issues or want something new, just ask". For the most part they were able to edit and generate large parts of the documents without issue.

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