4 ms·

Google and Microsoft couldn't be further apart in their login architecture, and their distinguishing of personal and work accounts. Google does an excellent job

by YPPH 4y ago

Google and Microsoft couldn't be further apart in their login architecture, and their distinguishing of personal and work accounts. Google does an excellent job, everything is unified and sensible. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a mess. It looks like everything is mishmashed together. Sometimes logins will fail completely and you get weird error messages which look out of place in a production environment. Take but one bad example. If you look carefully, the sign in page for OneDrive is slightly different to the sign in page for other Microsoft services. It has functional differences too, namely, OneDrive's login page doesn't offer you FIDO2 passwordless authentication. Meanwhile, over on Google, everything goes through a unified login screen (accounts.google.com).

stbenjam 4y ago
Google’s handing of multiple accounts is still terrible though since everything is based off an index in order of sign in. Share or bookmark a work link? /u/2 is embedded in it. If later the personal account was the second login, you’d get access denied. They’re better at offering a switch account ui in some places but definitely not most.
- macNchz 4y ago
  This is one of the main reasons I love Firefox’s “Multi Account Containers” extension. I can easily keep logins segregated and don’t need to worry about whether any given part of Google’s ecosystem plays nicely with their account picker.
- jvolkman 4y ago
  If you're bookmarking, you can edit the URL and use `?authuser=foo@bar.com` instead. So instead of: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#starred https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#starred bookmark: https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=foo@bar.com#starred https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=foo@bar.com#starred The URL will be immediately rewritten as the proper /u/# for that user (which, as you say, depends on login order). Not sure why it's like this, but I could see it being related to not wanting PII in the URL.
watwut 4y ago
Setting up family link and kids account was not intuitive noe sensible at all. Better then ms teams mess, but then again, it would be hard to make it worst then that.

by YPPH 4y ago

stbenjam 4y ago

Google’s handing of multiple accounts is still terrible though since everything is based off an index in order of sign in. Share or bookmark a work link? /u/2 is embedded in it. If later the personal account was the second login, you’d get access denied. They’re better at offering a switch account ui in some places but definitely not most.

macNchz 4y ago
This is one of the main reasons I love Firefox’s “Multi Account Containers” extension. I can easily keep logins segregated and don’t need to worry about whether any given part of Google’s ecosystem plays nicely with their account picker.
jvolkman 4y ago
If you're bookmarking, you can edit the URL and use `?authuser=foo@bar.com` instead. So instead of: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#starred https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#starred bookmark: https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=foo@bar.com#starred https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=foo@bar.com#starred The URL will be immediately rewritten as the proper /u/# for that user (which, as you say, depends on login order). Not sure why it's like this, but I could see it being related to not wanting PII in the URL.

watwut 4y ago

Setting up family link and kids account was not intuitive noe sensible at all. Better then ms teams mess, but then again, it would be hard to make it worst then that.