Re:Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-...
by kbenson on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @03:08PM
(#13933751)
Well, it used to be that MS used ActiveX extensively, as with the original Outlook Web Access, to achieve things that weren't possible in the browser. It's entirely possible they try to use advanced features only available in IE depending on the User-Agent header.
Keep in mind, XMLHttpRequest was introduced by MS in IE, and then was adopted by other browsers. It's likely that some Google products use Chrome specific extensions if they detect Chrome. If you can provide a better experience, it's often worth doing so.
Unfortunately there may occasionally be problems where falling back to standard features may be buggy, or development has continued assuming the existence of proprietary features that has led to designs where the fallback to standard features isn't just a little slower, but massively slower, because it might be a less checked test case.
In other words, I think this is far more likely to be an oversight because of a poor testing regime than a purposeful action.
Keep in mind, XMLHttpRequest was introduced by MS in IE, and then was adopted by other browsers. It's likely that some Google products use Chrome specific extensions if they detect Chrome. If you can provide a better experience, it's often worth doing so.
Unfortunately there may occasionally be problems where falling back to standard features may be buggy, or development has continued assuming the existence of proprietary features that has led to designs where the fallback to standard features isn't just a little slower, but massively slower, because it might be a less checked test case.
In other words, I think this is far more likely to be an oversight because of a poor testing regime than a purposeful action.