11 ms·

Somebody in the reddit comments makes a very good point: > I think this is because of android. Android is based on Linux and identifies as Linux in a browser.

• xxs 4y ago
  Alternatively, not far long ago - there used to be a page with browser benchmarks - and Microsoft's darling performed the better. Your browsers (say firefox) showed worse - change the user agent and voila - it's the same as Microsoft's edge.
• xorcist 4y ago
  It very clearly identifies as "Android" even before it identifies as Linux, so it's not a perfect explanation.
  • jolux 4y ago
    Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us. Especially not since they’re working for one of the only major tech companies where all the devs use Windows and might make bad assumptions based on their environment.
    • kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
      I wonder if many people will even be aware that Android _is_ Linux.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • wolrah 4y ago
      > Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us. Yeah but this isn't just a "dumb mistake". It's been widely discussed in the web design world how terrible of an idea it is to use the user agent for basically anything at all for literally decades now. There are web designers working now who were not born when this problem was first discussed. It's not a "oops I didn't know about this recent change" thing, it's a "doing this has been known to be a bad idea for so long there are obsolete books that talk about it". The reason browser user agents are the disaster area they are today is entirely because bad web programmers have been abusing the user agent in ways they shouldn't be for so long.
      • jolux 4y ago
        Microsoft is far from the only company that sniffs, they all sniff. If you give people information they’re bound to use it. This is all commonplace in web dev.
    • eddieroger 4y ago
      If it was truly a dumb mistake, of which I am doubtful, then let's see it fixed now that it's in the wild. User Agent detection has never been a great method of client identification, and is just a means to an end in the absence of a better option.
      • jolux 4y ago
        I don’t know that it was a mistake but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
  • FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
    Could also be the fact that a lot of video drivers/coders works slower on linux?
    • weberer 4y ago
      No, because that is untrue.
      • hutzlibu 4y ago
        Have you done much gaming, or video intense stuff on linux? On all my various devices, linux gpu performance was worse, than with stock windows. But I never shopped for specific linux supported devices, which is the only known way to me, to get comparable results.
        • weberer 4y ago
          Yes, I have. My gaming desktop is running Manjaro Linux with a 1660 super and game performance is great. I haven't yet run into a game that this PC struggled with. My home media center is running LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4 and video playback is perfect. It can play 4k h265 video with no problems.
          • hutzlibu 4y ago
            And have you compared the same device with windows?
            • weberer 4y ago
              I'd imagine Windows would run like absolute shit on a Raspberry Pi.
        • BeefWellington 4y ago
          Benchmarks going back a couple years show near parity on both.[1] Even recent NVidia cards show comparable results.[2] It's perhaps a 5-10% hit for running via Wine, sometimes less, and rarely it's faster on Linux. There's certainly very few actual compatibility issues with most games, and generally those I've encountered affect both Windows and Linux equally (see: GTA:V shadows on AMD cards). As someone who only has Linux systems and games often, my big barriers are not performance related; they're Anti-Cheat related. So to suggest that this is the source of Microsoft's decision making is laughable. [1]: https://youtu.be/aE5WyObAFtk https://youtu.be/aE5WyObAFtk [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rtx3090-windows-linux&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rtx3090-...
• pedro2 4y ago
  Of course it's not on purpose. Companies usually don't do this on purpose nowadays. They just ignore concerns from QA (for example, regarding competitors). Google does this. Microsoft does this. The days of active malfeasance are gone with Windows 3.1 and its DR-DOS fake glitches (on Win 3.1 beta, toggled off on final).
  • omega3 4y ago
    I think the opposite is true in fact, Windows 11 is really anti consumer by design (anti choice, anti privacy etc).
    • MonkeyClub 4y ago
      I agree on the point that Win 11 is anti-consumer, but I think that's part of the overall trend to turn the computer into an appliance, i.e. not a device that you have to administer, but a handy tool as easy as your fridge or washing machine. Now if that takes away a bit of freedom and privacy, well, you can still opt out on any device that could run Windows 11, and use another OS instead. I'm wondering whether this won't be possible later down the line, though, given the trend.
      • spookie 4y ago
        If a trend is morally questionable, no honorable entity would follow it. Furthermore, since Windows is so prevalent, you're gonna have an hard time using something else. Given you're neither tech savvy, or rich, which most people aren't. So no, there are no excuses for a company this large to have such malpractices, we're talking about a private company with more power than many small nations.
        • MonkeyClub 4y ago
          Yep, I agree. The issue would be to discern between honourable and dishonourable (or shameless) entities, but there starts the domain of concessions to convenience, and PR.
  • 4y ago
• alekun 4y ago
  > Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS. humm… I wonder why is that..
• bayindirh 4y ago
  Considering Microsoft Front Page embedded Internet Explorer specific instructions automatically anti-alias image edges to make them look better on IE, and worse in Netscape, this kind of behavior doesn't surprise us anymore. Microsoft used up all its credit by abusing its power, tech, and goodwill of its users over the years. They also did it again with VSCode by close-sourcing more parts of it. There's no reason to think that Microsoft did it unintentionally. The burden of proof is theirs.
  • lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Come on man, that was more than a decade ago with entirely different management. I'm surprised you aren't still typing Micro$oft too.
    • bayindirh 4y ago
      I don't see any evidence that the new management is targeting anything different than the old management. Care to elaborate?
      • krageon 4y ago
        People are of the opinion that if it hasn't perpetrated bad things recently, it is best to pretend it's not likely. Even if the current environment fits precisely within a known piece of the playbook.
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        If Microsoft hated Linux as much as they did in the 90s, we'd know. It's cute to pretend like Modern Day MS is drafting up Halloween documents every-other-Friday, but the reality is that they don't really care that much anymore. Microsoft congratulated Valve for their progress on DXVK, a program that undermines one of Microsoft's most proprietary APIs. Microsoft expanded the capabilities of the Github free tier, even though they had no real incentive to add things like free CI/CD time or unlimited private repositories. Github as a privately-owned company monetized those features. I think anyone who's paid attention to Microsoft over the past 20 years could tell you that they're out of the game these days. Hell, if you still don't believe me, go look at their revenue share. Windows, Xbox, Office... all of that plays second-fiddle to Azure now. Without Linux, Microsoft couldn't deliver the same first-rate cloud experience as AWS. Without Linux, WSL doesn't exist on Windows. Microsoft has realized that their role in this play is to sell thick-clients and let servers do what servers do best, there's pretty much nothing I've seen in the past 10 years that would suggest ongoing hostility towards Linux users from Microsoft. Maybe that dotnet hotloading fiasco was the worst thing? As someone who wouldn't touch dotnet anyways, I don't really care how good it's Linux tooling is.
• lnxg33k1 4y ago
  I am not sure, but I don’t think people wake up one morning and start assuming that a company like Microsoft is shit out of nowhere, maybe this time was a mistake, but Microsoft has built its reputation of a anti user, anticompetitive and shitty company without anyones help It’s not that people dreamt about Microsoft edge pop up when people tried to download chrome, also I assume they have someone with android and Linux since they planned to run android apps and they worked on wsl 1/2 on Windows But yeah if we want to say that Microsoft is victim and we’re all delusional then go on
  • charcircuit 4y ago
    >I don’t think people wake up one morning and start assuming that a company like Microsoft is shit out of nowhere Most people just copy other's opinion about it being bad because they like to hate on stuff.
• sascha_sl 4y ago
  Lack of consideration is just the less flattering version of doing it on purpose when it comes down to it. I'm still hoping for the unlikely Gamepass + Steam Deck combo, but I'm not holding my breath.
• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Another reason browser agent strings are a terrible idea
• Shadonototra 4y ago
  > Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS. If supposed world class developers working for a trillion dollar company identify Android as linux, then yeah, we should excuse them like they are a small indie company working on their first big week end project No big deal, move on I find it funny, white knights defending microsoft NO MATTER WHAT Very funny, almost sad, a tiny bit
  • ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    I dont believe for a moment that most devs, even at places like MS, are any better than devs anywhere else. You might get more specialization in things like compilers, but for end user UI, there are other companies much more dedicated. Same can be said for all companies. Just because they are large doesn't make them composed entirely of competence or even excellence.
• carpenecopinum 4y ago
  > Obviously it's more fun for people to assume it's been done on purpose & bash MS I mean, it definitely is, but you also have to admit that it's very in-character for Microsoft to intentionally break stuff, just to push their own software. MS Teams, for example, will pretend that Video calls aren't possible to do on Firefox. Until you use a tool like User-Agent-Switcher to set the user-agent to MS Edge and you find out that video calls and screen sharing work flawlessly. Chrome works as well. With their browser essentially being a reskinned version of it, I guess even they considered it to be too unbelievable if they claimed that video calls couldn't be done in it.
  • tomduncalf 4y ago
    It wouldn’t surprise me if they just don’t want the testing and support overhead of supporting Firefox, and so it’s easier to block it than let people use it but it might be broken (and they then file a support ticket regardless of if it says “unsupported” etc). A shame for sure but probably makes good business sense given Firefox’s declining user base.
    • bayindirh 4y ago
      Considering you can do a lot of automated testing with many browsers at the same time, this excuse doesn't fly.
      • mccorrinall 4y ago
        Aren’t they the authors of playwright anyway? THE library to test with all major browsers.
        • bayindirh 4y ago
          I'm not a web dev, but oh, you're right [0]. [0]: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
        • tomduncalf 4y ago
          I imagine the tricky bit is testing the audio/video parts – "does the video work reliably with multiple participants" or whatever is probably quite hard to entirely judge in an automated fashion. It wouldn't surprise me if a reasonable amount of tests for something like Teams were still manual, though I'd love to be proven wrong!
• chris37879 4y ago
  I mean, Microsoft should know that the browser's user agent is untrustworthy and should be using feature detection. They did do this on purpose, and it's a bad practice in the web industry.
• kllrnohj 4y ago
  Does that really change anything though? Why should Android on xcloud be limited to 720p? Isn't that still just the same performance throttling issue when using an Android tablet or an Android TV device, worthy of the same outrage? Also why should my 1080p (or greater) phone be limited to 720p anyway?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • BizarroLand 4y ago
    Nominally it's a bandwidth issue, trying to save those poor beleaguered telecoms that have been forced to offer unlimited data to their greedy grubby jerkwad customers some money so they don't have to tap into the billions of dollars the government gives them just for existing. (Lot of sarcasm there, just in case, but the point stands) I don't know why they can't cross check to see if you're on wifi or mobile data before restricting you, though.
• zaptheimpaler 4y ago
  I mean even if it wasn’t on purpose, how bad of an engineer do you have to be to assume Linux = Android? Linux is like the bedrock of most software development, most servers and embedded devices. Either assumption, malice or ignorance, sound bad to me.