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"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We d

"Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." - Hanlon's razor I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn't officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented <1% of our user base. It just didn'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. 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'd never hear about them. The support team did their job. This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.

ng12 10y ago
Sure, but Microsoft also spent a decade developing a different dialect of JavaScript to force vendor lock-in. You can't discredit malice either.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  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.
  - fdupoo 10y ago
    Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?
    - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
      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.
- kbenson 10y ago
  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.
  - mamon 10y ago
    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?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      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.
      - 10y ago
simplyluke 10y ago
Terrible customer service here is undeniable though. Customer support should gain you customers, not lose them. Microsoft needs to address that.
- rsweeney21 10y ago
  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.
sp0rk 10y ago
> 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?
- npizzolato 10y ago
  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.
- rsweeney21 10y ago
  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.
golfer 10y ago
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.
- kayoone 10y ago
  Ironically, people seem to forgive Apple a lot of similar practices.
  - movedx 10y ago
    Can you provide an example, with a citation? :)
    - lotso 10y ago
      You used to (maybe still) couldn't watch Apple Keynote presentations on any other browser than Safari.
      - MVorlm 10y ago
        Microsoft Edge is supported now.
    - skc 10y ago
      Safari on Windows was the obvious one. Lord what a mess.
  - hrktb 10y ago
    Microsoft was not just 'borderline unethical', it got charged times and times for severe illegal practices. Apple is far from there (yet ?)
    - 10y ago
adrianratnapala 10y ago
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.
- movedx 10y ago
  And the parent comment's point is that bug won't reach the team responsible for that :-)
princekolt 10y ago
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.
angry_octet 10y ago
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.
- NamTaf 10y ago
  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.
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    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.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
>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.
flukus 10y ago
> 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.
rossy 10y ago
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.

ng12 10y ago

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

DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
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.
- fdupoo 10y ago
  Why does ms have it's own version of all these languages?
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    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.
kbenson 10y ago
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.
- mamon 10y ago
  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?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    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.
    - 10y ago

simplyluke 10y ago

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

rsweeney21 10y ago
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.

sp0rk 10y ago

> 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?

npizzolato 10y ago
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.
rsweeney21 10y ago
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.

golfer 10y ago

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.

kayoone 10y ago
Ironically, people seem to forgive Apple a lot of similar practices.
- movedx 10y ago
  Can you provide an example, with a citation? :)
  - lotso 10y ago
    You used to (maybe still) couldn't watch Apple Keynote presentations on any other browser than Safari.
    - MVorlm 10y ago
      Microsoft Edge is supported now.
  - skc 10y ago
    Safari on Windows was the obvious one. Lord what a mess.
- hrktb 10y ago
  Microsoft was not just 'borderline unethical', it got charged times and times for severe illegal practices. Apple is far from there (yet ?)
  - 10y ago

adrianratnapala 10y ago

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.

movedx 10y ago
And the parent comment's point is that bug won't reach the team responsible for that :-)

princekolt 10y ago

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.

angry_octet 10y ago

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.

NamTaf 10y ago
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.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  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.

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

>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.

flukus 10y ago

> 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.

rossy 10y ago

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.