I'm guessing (especially when you consider that OS X is in there) that it has more to do with the support burden and small number of people using Linux as a desktop OS than trying to get people to buy Windows.

So they make it run buggy in order to reduce the support burden??? Surely that makes for more support calls.

I'd have much more respect for them if they just came clean and said "we hate linux users, if you want to use that OS don't use our products because we try our best to make them not work on linux". Look at what they did with Skype for example. At least then we'd know not to try their stuff.

Almost always, nobody has any intention to "make it run buggy." It's about making it run well on platforms you care about (and officially support), and ignoring the others. Complicated software is usually fragile enough that it will have similar results.

If a user agent change makes the software slower for a platform then that's not exactly an accident so somebody must have had the intention to make it run buggy.

This has nothing to do with 'making it run well on platforms you care about' but it is 'making it run bad on platforms you don't care about'.

It takes more code for the software to act in this way (this is what proves this is intentional and not accidental), and more support to boot.

It's been mentioned a bunch in this thread already, but they're doing feature support detection by user-agent string. It's not malicious, it's sloppy.

Here's a quote from the /r/linux thread [1], courtesy of /u/angellus:

> This is certainly a bug. It is not a targeted attacked against Linux users. Report it to Microsoft. Microsoft is just doing really shitty feature detection using User Agent strings instead of, well actual feature detection. I was able to reproduce the same result by setting my User Agent to Firefox 52 on Windows 98. If I set it to a "more realistic" user agent like IE 7 on Windows XP, it would actually redirect me to a busted page to upgrade my browser instead of Word Online. It appears if Microsoft cannot figure out your User Agent (including your OS as part of it), it gives you a busted experience.

1 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

That commenter appears not to have heard of browser detection or UA sniffing, it has nothing to do with feature detection, they're a completely different method (and paradigm).

Nor should browser detection cause Firefox to follow a different switch in the code when on a different OS, not since about version 2 when I think there were bugs making that useful.

Really browser detection was something needed to handle MSIE way back in the day, or possibly other browsers before web fonts.

But this ain't browser detection, definitely not feature detection, it's OS detection - the system responds differently when only the OS in the UA string is altered.

What he's saying is that they're using UA sniffing in place of feature detection (which is frowned upon these days but was common at one point).

> If a user agent change makes the software slower for a platform then that's not exactly an accident so somebody must have had the intention to make it run buggy

That's not necessarily true. For example they might be doing polyfills that are slower than the native windows implementation.

I feel like I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thinking everywhere. The canonical example for me is lately is "he voted for Trump/Hillary therefore he must support groping/war/whatever".

I wish people would ease up on these kinds of deduction-based motivation attribution. It's my view that there enough self-professed unethical motivations for us to work against, without speculating. The speculation just muddies the waters.

Microsoft has a history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

And that is merely one of the most documented cases.

From former employees, I know that the culture at that time and into the late 90's was that Microsoft employees were a better class of human being than non-employees. Knowing that, it's not surprising to see the amount of Us vs Them behavior that showed up as anything from active antagonism to malicious neglect.

The kids don't remember that time frame, and wonder why the old farts malign Microsoft. It's because they went out of their way to make malice look like incompetence. That sort of malignancy deserves not to be forgotten.

It's as if your kids only know Uncle Phil as a Born-Again Christian but you still remember him as a raging alcoholic and how Aunt Sue always had a black eye, or as the guy who molested you when you were a kid. Are you just supposed to forget that ever happened? You accept his apology (except MICROSOFT NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZED), enjoy him while you can but you still have to be on guard in case he falls off the wagon.

You are being very naive at best. There is at least a couple of problems with current Microsoft:

1) Windows is still closed source, their OpenDocument support is broken, and Secure Boot gives them an amount of power incomparable to anyone else in the industry: https://nudgedelastic.band/2016/01/i-am-still-not-buying-the...

2) DirectX 12 is Windows Store exclusive and it will never be possible to use DX12 apps on e.g. Wine: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...

3) Patents: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3042699/open-source-tools/m... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2841412/open-source-softwar... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890580

Of course, all of these things are legal.

You are talking about something Microsoft did in the early 1990s. It is very likely that most or even all of the people involved don't work for Microsoft any more. No company is ever going to be perfect, but I honestly believe that today's Microsoft is a much better corporate citizen than 1990s Microsoft was. (And, with the AARD code, while they shipped it turned on in the beta, it was disabled in the final release – which suggests to me that someone in charge at Microsoft had second thoughts about this even back then.)

If 1990s Microsoft did something seemingly anti-competitive, it probably was intentionally anti-competitive. If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.

> If 1990s Microsoft did something seemingly anti-competitive, it probably was intentionally anti-competitive.

Ok

> If 2010s Microsoft does something seemingly anti-competitive, while it still might be by intention, I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it is the unintentional side effect of an innocent (even if misguided) decision.

That's fine with me. But the degree to which MS has abused its monopoly position in the past, the degree to which they have been found guilty of bribery (in very recent times) in order to push MS products where Linux would have been a viable (and more sensible) alternative (for instance: http://www.intellinews.com/former-romanian-minister-admits-t... , there are plenty of other examples), the Windows 10 privacy violations, the crippling of Skype on Linux and so on make me believe that there are still at least some parts of MS that have not changed all that much.

Fully agree. Replied in a different place, same arguments apply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955241

It was something that Microsoft did in the early 1990's. And they did nearly identical things in the late 1990's. And they did more of them in the early 2000's.

Their fall from the heights since then has allowed me to ignore whatever malfeasance they committed in the late 2000's or early 2010's, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen.

And for what it is worth, what they did to companies I worked for in the late 90's and early 2000's consisted of lying, cheating and stealing. It consisted of blatantly dishonest and illegal behavior. And it was completely institutionalized so that the default behavior was dishonest and malicious.

You can be wonderfully forgiving and credulous, but I personally find it very hard to do so.

Steve Ballmer was in charge of Microsoft a little over three years ago. Do you think he's the only executive left over from the 90's?

It takes a long time for a company to recover from a toxic management team even after they are gone. Some never do.

You are within your rights to give the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is also within their rights to get in front of this and show that "Microsoft Loves Linux" on the client side as well as the server side by addressing the issue instead of saying "well, just use Windows and it will work".

U should modify your language to sound like less of an apologist. Apologists are less effective when they are easily spotted as such. ;-)

I'm guessing you don't really understand what he's saying. He's saying that by pretending to be Windows instead of Linux the webapplication runs better. There's nothing native about it.

The same exact website/piece of software runs better by saying "Hi I'm on windows". This obviously means foul play.

> This obviously means foul play.

No, it really doesn't. It could just as likely mean they load a bunch of slow polyfills and workarounds when the browser is not part of a whitelist (assuming it won't have support for various APIs that it actually does support).

I struggle to consider that Microsoft is really that inept as to only be able to design it that well. I mean, do they do any testing at all? Across the browsers and platforms accessing their sites?

Seriously, white-listing??

I don't buy it.

> I struggle to consider that Microsoft is really that inept as to only be able to design it that well

Have you ever used Microsoft software?

It seems most likely that they do testing on exactly the browsers and operating systems they say they support and no other platforms and do not want to expand the list because they'd have to provision more environments and do more testing.

I'd buy that if it sent out the exact same code that it would without that UA. But it doesn't.

What don't you buy? They test with a certain set of supported platforms. If a client isn't one of those (whitelisted) platforms, then they may send out a bunch of inefficient polyfills so they know XYZ functionality exists, even if it's slow.

Except that it works just fine if those 'unsupported' platforms are treated in the exact same way as the supported ones. To make it seem as if a whole pile of work was done in order to make unsupported platforms work less well but this is a good thing is something that I find very hard to reconcile. And if this were a company that did not have a history of exactly such tricks it might be more believable, MS - with me at least - does definitely not have the benefit of the doubt in cases like these.

No, a whole bunch of work was (hypothetically) _not_ done to verify if they were supported or not. I'm not suggesting that it's a good thing, I'm suggesting that laziness, sloppiness, or a simple oversight are just as plausible as malice.

It is _less_ effort to say "We support these specific platforms, and rather than doing actual feature detection, we'll just load a bunch of polyfills to make it work on anything else".

How thoroughly do you figure that guy posting the question tested it compared to whatever QA process MS does for supported platforms?

Good enough to detect a problem.

lol.

No it doesn't. It is just shoddy detection. It may rely on some windows native APIs that may or may not exist on all linux variants. The fact that it worked by changing the user agents in some case doesn't mean it would be wise for them to deploy it for everyone. The proper fix would obviously be to actual detection and not rely on the user agent string.

You're guessing. Please look at what people say who investigated this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...

No. I think he understands exactly what the article means, and is correctly stating that it is not necessarily foul play at all.

If you have different stuff available, you might choose to only cache/microoptimise the pages served to 98% of your userbase, which would lead to this type of effect with no malicious intent.

>Almost always, nobody has any intention to "make it run buggy."

Well, Microsoft has a long history of "making things buggy" everywhere else to create lock-ins. This instance may not be strictly related, but people's attitude has been shaped by years of anti-competitive stuff that MS has pulled.

They do have a reputation, but it's decades old, and things have changed quite a bit. I don't think we should base our conclusions on stale data.

Decades old. The GWX consent brouhaha is decades old? Edge (not IE) becoming the default browser all by itself is decades old? Riiiiiiiight. Decades of consistent data, methinks.

I really don't get why they can't put the browser they like as the defaultone into their OS. Not that I'm an MS apologetic (I don't really use anything MS since time immemorial) but it seems silly to me, frankly.

For a while I was changing my browser back and forth between firefox versions. Every single time windows 10 would detect that change and 'protect' me from it by opening the default programs control panel and setting the default browser to Edge.

It makes sense if they want the default browser to require user confirmation to change. But setting it to Edge in the meantime? That's just being rude and anti-customer.

Well that I didn't know. What I meant was shipping with a given browser which I see as their right. What you describe is naughty and not good at all.

I think it has a habit of changing itself to default even after the user sets something else as the default. Minor annoyance though compared to the overall pain of using a windows machine.

"Minor" depends on whom you ask: each time this happens, MS generates n angry support tickets...for me, not for themselves, of course: "the computer is broken again and I have lost all bookmarks and sign-in data, why did you break it again?!?" (The good news is, of course, that nothing is "lost" except for the default browser flag: resetting to FF fixes it...until next time)

As far as I am concerned, they can. But they are not bloody supposed to change it again, after I have changed it to something of my choosing. I am sick and tired of "yeah, so you have set your default browser to FF, but we know better than you what you want; so we have reset it again on yet another Patch Tuesday. Admit it, YOU WANT THE E!" (Consent, what consent?)

Does this only happen with certain configurations or something? I've been using Windows 10 since it came out and can't really remember this happening to me

As far as I'm aware this has to do with the fact that major updates are being delivered in a manner that's basically equivalent to a full reinstall, causing a lot of settings to get reset to defaults. This update method is particularly common for the insiders, but still happens from time to time on the general builds: anniversary update, creator's update and such.

Makes sense.

Makes sense for people who want nightlies and constant flux. Makes absolutely zero sense for production machines.

No idea; I am not MS's QA, and only have a handful of configs. Plus it doesn't even happen consistently on the configs that I do have.

Simple solution, do not do preferential treatment based on one's OS.

While it's a solution, it's not a simple one. Developers don't have this luxury. Choosing an OS to support means supporting all the APIs and possible ecosystem that comes with it.

But they're not supporting an OS, but a browser here.

If it works in Firefox on Windows, there's no technical reason for it not to work the same way in Firefox on Linux.

Yeah there's no reason at all that anything would work differently in one browser or another, signed, a guy who has never done Web development.

Again: operating system, not browser.

There are differences in supported features on different OS's with the same browser. They don't ship identical bits on each platform. The differences are pretty minor OS integration things usually, but there are differences.

As an end user, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between 'made to run buggy' and 'put no effort in to make it not buggy'.

They are most likely doing the 'put no effort in to make it not buggy' action, and it just appears that they are doing it on purpose.

But the only time it is buggy if you SAY it's Linux. If you say it's Windows, it works fine. That's not having the software passively become buggy, that's CHANGING the way the software works if and only if the OS is Linux, but working correctly if it's told (but isn't actually) Windows.

I don't think this is a conspiracy, but I don't think the characterization that users think that because OneDrive works on Windows better than Linux, buggy by inaction is assumed to be buggy by action: this situation is far more damning than that.

It seems entirely plausible that there are optimizations that are only applied on certain platforms or something with the idea that any platform should fall back to the slower but better-supported behavior.

Should be testable, for example what optimisations are in the FF48 code sent to Windows that breaks FF48 on Linux?

MS will I'm sure provide those details to demonstrate their lack of malice. /s

If you're that hot and bothered about it try fetching a page with both UAs.

Except that we're talking - as far as is visible to me at the moment - about server side behavior, something that need not change at all depending on the user's client.

No we're not. The bug report says 100% CPU. It's very clearly doing something client-side.

That is speculative. Yes, the client side is the one where the problem shows up but it's when the user agent is changed that the problem appears and the client side does not do anything with that user agent, it gets sent to the server. So something in the response from the server or some interaction with the server than causes the 100% CPU load.

That is exactly what the people you are responding to are saying.

The client makes a request to the server, and the server either returns the new optimized client code if the user agent is one that it knows supports the new code, or it sends back the older, slower, client code for an unknown user agent.

They are probably returning the older code because they KNOW it works, even if slower, while they aren't sure if the new code works or not on other machines. The author says it works fine on linux when getting the windows response, but we can't be sure he has tested every use case; maybe it fails under particular conditions, which is why they are still returning the old code. Or, perhaps, they just haven't tested it so they go with the safe thing, which is to return the older code.

So, you're telling me Microsoft is unable to tell the difference between code that doesn't work (the 'old' code) and code that does work (the 'new' code), and that to be safe they are returning the non-working code as a fix for potential problems that do not appear to exist?

If there is anything that would be more damaging to Microsoft than calling them malicious it is probably calling them incompetent, that's their core expertise you are challenging there.

Of course MS is unable to tell the difference between code that works and code that doesn't... on an unsupported platform.

Incompetent? "MS: We support Platform X, Y, Z." ... "Mob: MS must be malicious or incompetent because they aren't testing and pushing new code to Platform 9 3/4"

Unsupported. Means exactly that.

Well, from where I'm sitting a server should just do what it does for everybody without shipping different code to 'unsupported platforms' in order to make those platforms work worse. It either serves up the same to everybody or it contains code to support some platforms and blocks others.

A 'best effort but unsupported' isn't an option, it reminds me of the SMB days.

Either you support a platform outright, you send out the same code to everybody or you disable the platform completely. Other options are sufficiently gray to count as ways to coerce people into making a platform switch, and the MS rep seems to be pushing in exactly that direction.

" For the best experience, we recommend the operating system listed in this article. "

Right.

Well not all platforms are created equal... it's why you have fall-backs to "Stable but not shiny" for platforms you don't support... or platforms you don't know supports New Shiney Thing (tm).

If you know browser X, Y and Z support HTML5 video - because that's your actively supported platforms... but someone says I'm browser 6... do you push HTML5 video? Or do you fall back to stuff you know works but is years old tech?

If you don't know what Browser 6 is... then you have 2 options: Safe options or Feature Detection.

Safe option: I don't know if you can read HTML5... so I'm going to serve you HTML like it's 1999.

Feature Detection: I'm going to go out of my way to see if you can support random new technologies that I'm using. Can use HTML5? You can? Oh... Here's your scripts... or... You can't? Here's HTML like it's 1999.

The first option is a lot easier. "Unknown? You get 'Safe' tech that's not shiny, optimized or best-of-breed. Known? You get stuff we said we support on platforms we say we support".

Second option requires testing and blending the technology stack based on detected features. Possible - because plenty of people do it - but it's definitely not as easy to support dozens of techs in many many more possible combinations.

It looks like MS took Door #1.

Are you saying you would ship HTML5 code to platforms you don't know support HTML5? Because... that sounds like a recipe to send "broken" code to users because "everything should work the same everywhere" which is something that happens... never.

> Are you saying you would ship HTML5 code to platforms you don't know support HTML5?

No, I would stick to open standards supported by the vast majority of users until the next wave was supported by the vast majority of users and so on. I would never detect a user agent and make crippling decisions based on the response.

And if you do decide to resort to such trickery then you'd better make sure that you extract the maximum out of each platform that presents itself otherwise you open yourself up to claims of favoritism.

As for the HTML5 video, given that I've pioneered that stuff and worked very hard to keep the video-on-the-web scene plug-in free and working with all browsers it was with serious reluctance that I eventually switched to H.264 encoded video with flash as the player because to me that was the wrong way to go about it but the market literally demanded it.

I suspect that if we had not had flash a proper <video> tag would have been implemented ages ago.

"stick to open standards supported by the vast majority of users" is exactly what you get when the user agent isn't known. It just turns out in this case that it's unoptimized and performs pretty badly.

Please. If they displayed a page saying "sorry, Linux isn't supported; try using a supported platform instead" you'd be over here taking them to task for that.

Actually, I would not. MS is under no obligation to support anything other than their own platforms. But if it works it should work well rather than be effectively cripple-ware.

Well I completely disagree that not being able to use the software at all is better than a degraded experience and I can remember at one point Linux users railing against exactly what you're now advocating.

Microsoft doesn't need to spend money making the Linux desktop-experience suck, it has done so on its own for well over a decade.

Skype was messed up for ages, they actually have a really cleaned up Linux client, it's based around Electron so it actually works a lot better than the older one. Skype is an example that they do care about Linux too.

The new Skype client is crap compared to the old one. 99% of all settings are gone. Video calls are gone.

I've said this before, but the last time Skype worked reliably for me was on the Nokia n800, circa 2008. I had a subscription for several years 2012-2015ish and didn't have an acceptable quality call once.

Yikes, Skype is electron based? That explains why it hogs so much memory.

Software is naturally buggy. It only becomes non-buggy through pro-active effort.

If you're writing apps that work in i.e. And not chrome you're not going for a big user base. I.e. Is 2% of our traffic and 50% of my time.

Treating Linux as a "best efforts" might be a reasonable middle ground. No expensive support commitment, but then they needn't hobble it in scenarios like this where the experience/support burden is not related to the OS (since it's in the browser)

Yeah but if nothing else you've got to have the environment for someone to test it with, right?

> If someone listens up there, sooner or later they'll realize there is more money in the subscription business than in one-time OS purchases, and they will put the money where the mouth is.

I think MS is nearly a decade ahead of you there.

More money - and mindshare (=future money).

Chromebooks run linux, and if this issue affects those, then O365 is looking terrible against Gsuite for huge numbers of school students. In five years, those students will be starting their working lives demanding Gsuite.