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.