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's sometimes necessary.

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's very rare to find a rendering bug in these browsers that only affects a single platform. So, what I don'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's hard not to attribute this to malice. Even perpetuating the idea that it's not possible to write truly cross-platform software or that web apps have compatibility with specific operating systems works in Microsoft's favour, since they sell the most popular desktop operating system.

Well, Microsoft often doesn't get the benefit of the doubt because of their history of incredibly aggressive, borderline unethical behavior. Being a convicted monopolist tends to color people's attitudes to a company. Let alone something ridiculous like trying to destroy the open source movement in its nascent stages, stealing Google's search results, or running the completely insane Scroogled campaign. And all the other things Microsoft has done to erode good will.

Ironically, people seem to forgive Apple a lot of similar practices.

Microsoft was not just 'borderline unethical', it got charged times and times for severe illegal practices. Apple is far from there (yet ?)

The stuff Apple does on iOS is worse than the worst of the Windows lockin. The difference is a DOJ that is not interested in monopoly cases.

The real difference is that now we have a choice. With Windows there was monopoly and it was practically impossible to use another platform if you wanted to exchange documents with others and similar (which is basic functionality for computer).

IMHO what Apple is doing only harms themselves. While they had Steve Jobs they could be successful in spite of their practices, but with no breakthroughs for some years now such "small" differences will become important. Google is beating them hands down in all departments of mobile platform space.

I actually wish Apple stayed strong because we need competition, but in the long run I don't see them as a dominant force in mobile OS anymore. They will likely become what they were with Macs before Steve Jobs came back - a niche player.

They still make the biggest chunk of profit in the mobile space by some margin. Google might beat them in all technical departments, but Apple is making tons of cash from iOS.

Sure, they still make a ton of money, but I am arguing that their power is declining due to stagnation in innovations. Once the cycle reverses the profits will follow too. All IMHO, of course.

Is Apple not the world's most valuable corporation? I think we can still call them pretty strong.

e: per WP:

> Apple is the world's largest information technology company by revenue, the world's largest technology company by total assets

Apple is legacy hardware vendor, I don't see anything wrong making software for you own hardware to complete ecosystem. MS, on the other hand, tried to capture, lock in users' generic hardware and kill competitors, which is totally different case imho.

Why? That is worse.

Can you provide an example, with a citation? :)

You used to (maybe still) couldn't watch Apple Keynote presentations on any other browser than Safari.

Microsoft Edge is supported now.

Safari on Windows was the obvious one. Lord what a mess.

What was insane or wrongful about the Scroogled campaign? Besides the dorky name.

overturned convicted monopolists

I hear this phrase "It didn't make business sense" all the time. It's a persistent misunderstanding of business and customer relationships.

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 everyone wants, and the one with the least bugs.

If you're going to say 'screw you' 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.

At a company the size of MS that is not a CTO level decision by any stretch unless it is a broad-based 'all-in' or 'all-out' decision to steer the company at a high level. It's much lower than that and it almost certainly is based on an assessment of competing priorities.

No, even at Microsoft. It won't be at the level of "the support for this app will work for firefox on linux" but it will be setting policy like "By default all Microsoft websites will support browsers x/y/z on platforms p/q/r/s, unless exempted by the relevant VP with supporting business case" etc.

Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.

That just isn't true (and I worked on Chakra while at Microsoft).

I think you're thinking of J++ (Microsoft's version of Java, not JavaScript). Now JScript (Microsoft's version of ECMAScript) does have some minor differences in the dialect, but that was only because the ECMA standard was at a standstill back then. Mozilla had no problems extending their implementation to match either.

Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?

They're just extensions in the same way that GCC has its own extensions for C and C++.

J++ was created to counter shortcomings in the design of early Java language versions that Sun was not keen to re-integrate back into the Java language. That itself isn't bad (as other JVM-compatible languages exist, like Scala and Groovy) except that J++ then needed Microsoft's own Java VM with its own platform-specific runtime extensions - and that's what the Sun lawsuit was about. I agree it was badly handled by Microsoft, and in the end Microsoft just ditched Java and reinvented J++ as C# and the .NET Framework - which is where we are today.

As for JScript: before JavaScript was standardised there were extensions being added by everyone (Netscape had their own, as did Microsoft). I think Microsoft extended JScript in a very conservative way: the main change is the addition of the `new ActiveXObject` wrapper for COM objects which made AJAX possible, and also made JScript useful for automating Windows (and server-side JavaScript with ASP/JScript predates Node.js by 13 years!) - to my knowledge JScript itself didn't add any syntactical changes and provided you didn't use ActiveXObject your code would run without issue in other JavaScript engines. Note that this isn't the same thing as DOM extensions in Internet Explorer, of which there were many.

I think it's worth pointing out that when IE6 was released in 2001 it was by-far, the most W3C-compliant web-browser in existence: for CSS2.1, Netscape's then compliance level was abyssal, and even beating out Opera at the time too.

I think that's another case of assuming bad intentions. Once Microsoft had a slightly differently behaving version of JavaScript that was in use by hundreds of millions of people, including many enterprise environments with internally developed and bought solutions that required Internet Explorer and it's version of JS and ActiveX to function who more often than not were also large Microsoft customers, the idea of breaking all the existing functionality just to be compliant with a standard becomes a non-starter. Were there people in the company that liked this situation? Probably. That doesn't mean it had to come about through malice. It's easy to see how a similar situation with Chrome or Safari could occur if they had greater than 90% of market share.

The only reason we are where we are today is because there's much less of a single dominant player in the browser space, so using standards are incentivized.

P.S. Yes, MS got their market share through shipping the browser with the OS. While it may have led to a monopoly in the browser space (or close to a monopoly, depending on how you want to look at it), I think it's hard to say any one of us wouldn't have made the same decision to bundle them were we in the position of selling the OS and also putting out a browser.

For one, every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled. Is that monopolistic behaviour? Should EU require Linux developer to provide "Choose your web browser" wizard popping up on every new Linux install, similar way it is on Windows?

Microsoft's​ behavior was illegal not because of bundling alone, but because of bundling a product (IE) in a different market with a product which was a monopoly (Windows) in what was held to be (based on additional Al evidence beyond mere bundling) an attempt to leverage a monopoly in one market to monopolize a different market.

So, no, it's not like any Linux distribution bundling a third-party browser like Firefox or Chromium, since none of those distributions have a monopoly to leverage to start with.

Honest question: if Microsoft didn't bundle IE and the user hadn't received a copy of those ubiquitous AOL CD-ROMs which came in the mail/magazines (and sometimes carried the Netscape Navigator installer), how is the user expected to consume content on the web without a web browser?

Surely, you'll at least need a decent web browser to get online to download a different browser of your choice, no?

> if Microsoft didn't bundle IE and the user hadn't received a copy of those ubiquitous AOL CD-ROMs which came in the mail/magazines (and sometimes carried the Netscape Navigator installer), how is the user expected to consume content on the web without a web browser?

Go to store, by a CD with browser, install. The age when boxed software was a major thing extended past the point when IE started bundling IE.

Of course, with a TCP/IP stack you can get software from the internet a lot of ways without a web browser, too. FTP was a thing, after all.

As a user who has just bought their first computer, would you a) like to go to the shop and spend money to buy more software b) try to figure out this thing called FTP, maybe going to the library to read up on it even though you have never heard of it so don't know what you are looking for c) just use this thing called "Internet Explorer" that sounds like what you want to do, is free and already installed on the computer you just turned on for the first time?

Before, and for several years after, Microsoft started bundling IE, many, perhaps most, ISPs (dialup and what passed for "broadband" at the time) typically delivered software CDs that you were expected to install with their own software (often including their preferred web browser, preconfigured with their preferred start page and other settings.)

If you just bought your first computer at that time, you weren't likely to have internet service to connect it to until you bought that separately, and when you did, you would have software, too.

Keep in mind, many people with a computer might not have the internet at all during this period. Purchasing internet service usually came with software to use it.

You're talking about an era when Gopher was still the dominant protocol on the internet.

Every ISP I used in the 90's sent a floppy or CD-ROM with a setup guide, web browser and some other shareware internet tools (FTP clients, Stuffit Expander on the Mac, etc)

There was a time when people bought software in boxes.

When I was a kid (before the publicly-used version of the Internet that we know and love today) and wanted to download software, I'd log into a BBS for my download.

Thanks for adding your perspective to the discussion though I'd argue that your experience might not have been representative of the larger population.

There is no need for a browser to download something from the internet. You only need the browser to browse the internet. (hence the name) A simple UI with a list of options was all that was needed.

The web is not the internet

Not every Linux distribution "comes with" Firefox or Chromium. They may be an option on the install disk and may even be part of the default install but they do not have to be installed and there are other choices (e.g. I typically install SeaMonkey because I like the mail client it comes with). In fact I can decide to install Linux on a PC and not install a browser at all. Last I checked it's still hard/impossible to remove IE/Edge from Windows. [1]

[1] Although admittedly the last real work I did in Windows was 7, so please correct me if the situation has changed.

You can remove IE in Windows 7: http://lifehacker.com/5164286/windows-7-lets-you-finally-uni...

I'm pretty sure I've seen the dialog in Windows 10 as well, but not for Edge, which I find even worse than IE.

If you were a web developer you'd be happy to know Edge is so much better at complying with web standards than IE ever was. Would love to know what people miss about IE.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

If you're not just repeating an ancient talking point and actually don't understand this, it would be well worth spending some time on Wikipedia coming up to speed on the goals of antitrust enforcement.

The short version is that the actions of a non-monopolist are looked at very differently than the actions of a monopolist.

Additionally, you're dead wrong about "every Linux distribution", and even if you weren't, the fact that there are many of them would moot an antitrust argument.

> every Linux distribution comes with either Firefox or Chromium preinstalled

False. See, for instance, Arch.

The point is that something seems to be actively looking at the user-agent string and then doing wrong things. Had they merely "not supported" Linux it would have worked fine.

Now it might still be a bug rather than malice, but it's a but that arises out of intentionally doing something stupid.

And the parent comment's point is that bug won't reach the team responsible for that :-)

> Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we'd never hear about them.

Wouldn't this filter out a lot of legitimate bugs that just happened to be discovered first on an unsupported browser?

Statistically speaking, the odds of a bug being found first on an unsupported platform, which represents such a small segment of your users, are low. The odds of it only ever being found on an unsupported platform, even though it's not platform specific, probably means it's rare enough for the business not to care about it.

Not really. Once they get discovered and reported on a supported browser, it sounds like they'd be routed to the team. Theoretically, bugs could exist in supported browsers that only get reported in unsupported browsers, but you'd have to weigh the likelihood of that against randomizing the team investigating bugs in unsupported scenarios.

Terrible customer service here is undeniable though. Customer support should gain you customers, not lose them. Microsoft needs to address that.

Agreed. However, most large software companies have terrible customer support. Google customer support is legendary...in a bad way.

I don't think anyone has figured out how to scale this correctly.

>This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.

Not us. If a user comes to us with a crusty-ass Dell with its own localized food chain of insects and our site doesn't work on IE5, they'll wake us up at 2am to tell us that.

> It just didn't make business sense.

I've seen this time and time again and every time the sum "linux" bug ends up affecting some browser/OS combination that is supported. It's not breaking because it's linux, it's breaking because there's a bug and sooner or later it will rear it's head elsewhere.

Not supporting a platform is completely fine. Purposefully hindering performance when it is proven that the software runs well on said platform is one of the shittiest moves a company could make. I wonder to which other products they do the same thing, especially on places where evaluating such behavior is not as simple as changing the contents of a string.