<story><title>Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)</title><url>https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onedrivefb-mso_o365brs/onedrive-for-business-open-is-very-slow-on-linux/3d33dc1b-3cc3-4c24-9998-9ab96bad31fc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsweeney21</author><text>&amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.&amp;quot; - Hanlon&amp;#x27;s razor&lt;p&gt;I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn&amp;#x27;t officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented &amp;lt;1% of our user base. It just didn&amp;#x27;t make business sense. We tested it on occasion anyway because we are decent people and, being part of the tech community, we were fans of Linux.&lt;p&gt;We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we&amp;#x27;d never hear about them. The support team did their job.&lt;p&gt;This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rossy</author><text>Having a list of supported browsers is fine. All modern browsers are supposed to implement the same web standards, but they all have a different set of supported features and subtle rendering and layout bugs. Sniffing the User-Agent string to detect the browser is a small evil, but it&amp;#x27;s sometimes necessary.&lt;p&gt;Having a list of supported operating-systems is totally different. For a web app, this is almost never okay. The popular cross-platform browsers (Chrom{e,ium} and Firefox) are excellent examples of well designed cross-platform software. They both abstract the underlying platform and implement the layout engine in platform-independent code. It&amp;#x27;s very rare to find a rendering bug in these browsers that only affects a single platform. So, what I don&amp;#x27;t understand is why OneDrive is sending different code to Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, and why are the support team being instructed to dismiss bug reports from Linux users when they are using a browser that would be supported on Windows? It&amp;#x27;s hard not to attribute this to malice. Even perpetuating the idea that it&amp;#x27;s not possible to write truly cross-platform software or that web apps have compatibility with specific operating systems works in Microsoft&amp;#x27;s favour, since they sell the most popular desktop operating system.</text></comment>
<story><title>Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)</title><url>https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onedrivefb-mso_o365brs/onedrive-for-business-open-is-very-slow-on-linux/3d33dc1b-3cc3-4c24-9998-9ab96bad31fc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsweeney21</author><text>&amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.&amp;quot; - Hanlon&amp;#x27;s razor&lt;p&gt;I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn&amp;#x27;t officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented &amp;lt;1% of our user base. It just didn&amp;#x27;t make business sense. We tested it on occasion anyway because we are decent people and, being part of the tech community, we were fans of Linux.&lt;p&gt;We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we&amp;#x27;d never hear about them. The support team did their job.&lt;p&gt;This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angry_octet</author><text>I hear this phrase &amp;quot;It didn&amp;#x27;t make business sense&amp;quot; all the time. It&amp;#x27;s a persistent misunderstanding of business and customer relationships.&lt;p&gt;You support Linux users (or Mac or WinXP or those behind a firewall or MSI installer needing etc etc) because you want to dominate your competitors, you want your product to be the one &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; wants, and the one with the least bugs.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re going to say &amp;#x27;screw you&amp;#x27; to some customers, that needs to be based on an actual assessment of costs, impact on users, how it can be mitigated, and what else that money would be spent on. A CTO level decision, not the support desk. And not supporting people running a standard web browser is just inept.</text></comment>