9 ms·

Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compa

Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Chrome stable with a non standard user agent doesn’t work on via the windows live url but works through the O365 corporate one, same with Safari Mobile without any user agent modification. This to me looks like stupidity more than malice, their link doesn’t even recommend Edge but rather Chrome and Safari…

screamingninja 4y ago
> Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent More than a "boo-boo" in my opinion. Same issue with the new Bing Chatbot - it only works on Edge, but then works perfectly in Firefox when you change your user agent string. Not a technical limitation, but just an anti-competitive desire to drive users to their own products.
Donckele 4y ago
+1 for stupidity
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    "Break it but make it look like a mistake" /s
    - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      I wouldn't even use sarcasm here. It it is literally an actual and important part of the history of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
  - criley2 4y ago
    Money isn't on the line w.r.t. to Firefox Nightly. I don't even think real money is on the line w.r.t. to Firefox entirely. We may love it, but Firefox is a big fat nobody in the browser space of 2023.
    - capitainenemo 4y ago
      Well, everyone is a nobody compared to Chrome at this point. Google has been extremely effective at taking over this space (enormous engineering team implementing new standards far faster than others can keep up, marketing (including on google landing page), poor/selective support for other browsers on the major platforms of the web that they wrote, install by default on 90% of the world's phones, pay for install by adobe and other products long ago). https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 7% firefox, 10% safari, 11% edge. By the measure of desktop browsers, Safari and Edge are nobodies too, and that is even with Microsoft's browser being a chrome skin and preinstalled on Windows.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
do people do not remember Dr Dos ? if a coyote eats your cat, its probably not an accident. its more likely because it's a coyote and that's what coyotes do. it's in their nature.
- oblio 4y ago
  DR DOS was 40 years ago and most people here don't remember Win Me because they were in kindergarten when it was released. Forums skew young, tech forums even more so.
- vorticalbox 4y ago
  As a counter point there is Hanlon's razor > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  - croes 4y ago
    If the smart guy mainly is dumb when it suits him, then it's malice.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Key word: “adequately”. A company making an honest mistake a few times is adequately explained by stupidity. A company making the exact same “mistake” year after year, decade after decade, is not.
  - yason 4y ago
    Microsoft isn't known to be stupid so that mostly leaves malice in their case.
  - fatneckbeard 4y ago
    thats not a counter point, thats just gaslighting. we have almost 50 years of microsoft behavior upon which we can base our judgements.
nerdponx 4y ago
> Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Microsoft has repeatedly engaged in malicious anticompetitive behavior. Without any additional information, I therefore think it's rational to place a high prior probability on this being malicious anticompetitive behavior. The data itself might be consistent with either an accident or malicious anticompetitive behavior. In that case, the prior dictates the posterior.
- scarface74 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - capableweb 4y ago
    This is what I see on Windows 11 + Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/aqzU2jr https://imgur.com/a/aqzU2jr Seems to be recommending Edge to me, or Chrome.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Okay. So Microsoft is now being anticompetitive by not recommending a minor browser. But it is recommending it’s biggest competitor?
      - capableweb 4y ago
        I don't think this particular instance might be anti-competitive, but I don't know their reasons for blocking Firefox Nightly in this case. I'm just jumping into the conversation to tell you that "You saw the part about it not even recommending Edge" was/is incorrect, as it does recommend Edge.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    More like "this guy has a long history of bullying others by pretending that they're out of spec, and now hes' saying someone is out of spec; what are the odds that it's an honest mistake?"
6c696e7578 4y ago
Sounds like Hanlon's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- capableweb 4y ago
  Imagine being a malicious actor in this world of ours, where as long as you could make it look like a potential mistake, you can get away with whatever, and people on the internet will simply say "Sounds like Hanlon's Razor" and you're basically in the clear :shrug:
  - l_theanine 4y ago
    Imagine being someone who made a simple mistake, and people on some weird internet forum with no identity verification said "Oh, that guy must be malicious!" and you lose your job. How would you feel? It's justified, if I understand the point you're trying to make, right? Which is worse? Edit: Not that I expect much from here, but since there are a number of child(ish) replies, I might as well clarify this for the replies that I'm not going to individually address: I'm not saying it's not cool to say "Microsoft sucks" or anything like that. If that's how you feel, then feel free to just say that. It's the internet. What's NOT cool is making up an imaginary situation where someone's simple error is part of this conspiracy that Microsoft is this terrible evil corporation, when there's thousands of decent, community-loving people that work there, one of whom made this error, more than likely by simple carelessness. It's not that big of a deal, it's not a showstopper by any means, and will be a simple fix in due time, almost undoubtedly. There are people behind software, but a lot of commenters seem to think it's professionally appropriate to just shit on things because they're from Microsoft or because they're from Apple, or wherever. Just say you don't like Microsoft, or that you don't like Apple. It's so antisocial to take the stance I keep seeing. I think the young people call this "parasocial" these days. Back in my day, we called it "fanatics", where there's this unhealthy obsession and seemingly anthromorphized view of corporations and institutions where hundreds or thousands of different, varied, diverse groups of people are all cohesively accomplishing or building things. It dismisses nuance, it rejects common sense understanding of how teams of people work, and is reductive and hostile to actually intelligent conversations about products and ideas.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
Devil's advocate: I don't think blocking bleeding-edge browsers is necessarily "stupidity." If you're smart enough to understand all the caveats of running a bleeding edge software program, you're smart enough to change your user agent string. If you're not, you have no business running nightly, and you're probably going to generate a lot of "yOuR sITE is BRokEN!" support emails / forum posts / bug reports for other projects, and conspiratorial posts screeching on social media. I see this all the time - people who run dev branches/nightlies/alphas and have the QA skills of a turnip who have no business doing so...and of course they're noisy as hell and waste a lot of people's times. If you don't know the most basic points of QA and how to file a bug report that doesn't waste people's time, stop running anything beyond "stable" or betas marked specifically for public consumption. You're not "cooler" or more 133t running nightly releases.
- usea 4y ago
  People can run whatever software they want. They don't need your permission, or to know how to file a bug report, or whatever other bullshit you've dreamed up. They're also allowed to complain when a site is broken in their browser. If you don't want to see unsophisticated complaints and bug reports, then you need to stop looking at them. Perhaps find a different profession/hobby where your user-hostile attitude actually benefits someone.
  - dcow 4y ago
    It’s also simply not true that more user-facing bugs happen on nightlies. I run nightlies at times and have never found them to be less stable in any tangible way that would affect site usability and show up in a bug report. On the contrary, nightlies are the first to get important bug fixes. It’s overwhelmingly likely that GP is just a lazy audacious dickwad ignoring valid bug reports.
  - curtisblaine 4y ago
    To be honest, they don't need to find a different profession / hobby, as long as their user hostile attitude makes them money.
  - 4y ago
hinkley 4y ago
Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does. “We are the smartest developers in the world” I’m told used to be something you heard on campus, presumably during the recruiting process, and in the board room. But if the Justice department comes knocking, they turn into Steve Urkel. You can’t have it both ways, and they “accidentally” break too many things that earn them millions of dollars. It’s not stupidity, it might not be malice, but if not malice then thoughtlessness or arrogance.
- Cpoll 4y ago
  > Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does. Not to say that they don't play dirty, but this isn't actually a contradiction. When you hire 100k workers, you're going to have the smartest developers in the world AND the Urkels. And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Peer pressure, oversight and processes are supposed to prevent a group of people from becoming more than the sum of their worst parts. Microsoft has always found a way to become the sum of the worst instead of the average or the intersection. They only stopped outwardly projecting that behavior for a while after the EU dropped sanctions on their asses. But that was four rounds of promotions ago so that’s all forgotten now.
  - croes 4y ago
    First of all, Urkel is actually a genius, so it doesn't fit. Second, if you know you have better and worse programmers you either control the work of the latter or you don't ket them work at your entry. Nobody sees the work of your smart programmers if nobody could login. So either MS is a lot dumber than I thought or they just don't care because they no most people can't or don't want replace MS software.
  - clcaev 4y ago
pas 4y ago
it's even worse than stupidity. it's all done in the name of UX. Apple style. please use the "supported" browser. they did the same with web Skype.
bubblethink 4y ago
>This to me looks like stupidity more than malice Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from malice.
- tanseydavid 4y ago
  Well-played! <golf-clap>

screamingninja 4y ago

> Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent More than a "boo-boo" in my opinion. Same issue with the new Bing Chatbot - it only works on Edge, but then works perfectly in Firefox when you change your user agent string. Not a technical limitation, but just an anti-competitive desire to drive users to their own products.

Donckele 4y ago

+1 for stupidity

nerdponx 4y ago
Stupidity is only ever acceptable when it agrees with business objectives. Malice is the sensible default assumption when money is on the line.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  "Break it but make it look like a mistake" /s
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    I wouldn't even use sarcasm here. It it is literally an actual and important part of the history of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
- criley2 4y ago
  Money isn't on the line w.r.t. to Firefox Nightly. I don't even think real money is on the line w.r.t. to Firefox entirely. We may love it, but Firefox is a big fat nobody in the browser space of 2023.
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    Well, everyone is a nobody compared to Chrome at this point. Google has been extremely effective at taking over this space (enormous engineering team implementing new standards far faster than others can keep up, marketing (including on google landing page), poor/selective support for other browsers on the major platforms of the web that they wrote, install by default on 90% of the world's phones, pay for install by adobe and other products long ago). https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... 7% firefox, 10% safari, 11% edge. By the measure of desktop browsers, Safari and Edge are nobodies too, and that is even with Microsoft's browser being a chrome skin and preinstalled on Windows.

fatneckbeard 4y ago

do people do not remember Dr Dos ? if a coyote eats your cat, its probably not an accident. its more likely because it's a coyote and that's what coyotes do. it's in their nature.

oblio 4y ago
DR DOS was 40 years ago and most people here don't remember Win Me because they were in kindergarten when it was released. Forums skew young, tech forums even more so.
vorticalbox 4y ago
As a counter point there is Hanlon's razor > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- croes 4y ago
  If the smart guy mainly is dumb when it suits him, then it's malice.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Key word: “adequately”. A company making an honest mistake a few times is adequately explained by stupidity. A company making the exact same “mistake” year after year, decade after decade, is not.
- yason 4y ago
  Microsoft isn't known to be stupid so that mostly leaves malice in their case.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  thats not a counter point, thats just gaslighting. we have almost 50 years of microsoft behavior upon which we can base our judgements.

nerdponx 4y ago

> Looks like someone made a boo-boo it’s simply based on the user agent, w/e string matching they do is too strict they aren’t checking for actual JS/WebASM compatibility or anything like that. Microsoft has repeatedly engaged in malicious anticompetitive behavior. Without any additional information, I therefore think it's rational to place a high prior probability on this being malicious anticompetitive behavior. The data itself might be consistent with either an accident or malicious anticompetitive behavior. In that case, the prior dictates the posterior.

scarface74 4y ago
[flagged]
- capableweb 4y ago
  This is what I see on Windows 11 + Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/aqzU2jr https://imgur.com/a/aqzU2jr Seems to be recommending Edge to me, or Chrome.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Okay. So Microsoft is now being anticompetitive by not recommending a minor browser. But it is recommending it’s biggest competitor?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      I don't think this particular instance might be anti-competitive, but I don't know their reasons for blocking Firefox Nightly in this case. I'm just jumping into the conversation to tell you that "You saw the part about it not even recommending Edge" was/is incorrect, as it does recommend Edge.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  More like "this guy has a long history of bullying others by pretending that they're out of spec, and now hes' saying someone is out of spec; what are the odds that it's an honest mistake?"

6c696e7578 4y ago

Sounds like Hanlon's razor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

capableweb 4y ago
Imagine being a malicious actor in this world of ours, where as long as you could make it look like a potential mistake, you can get away with whatever, and people on the internet will simply say "Sounds like Hanlon's Razor" and you're basically in the clear :shrug:
- l_theanine 4y ago
  Imagine being someone who made a simple mistake, and people on some weird internet forum with no identity verification said "Oh, that guy must be malicious!" and you lose your job. How would you feel? It's justified, if I understand the point you're trying to make, right? Which is worse? Edit: Not that I expect much from here, but since there are a number of child(ish) replies, I might as well clarify this for the replies that I'm not going to individually address: I'm not saying it's not cool to say "Microsoft sucks" or anything like that. If that's how you feel, then feel free to just say that. It's the internet. What's NOT cool is making up an imaginary situation where someone's simple error is part of this conspiracy that Microsoft is this terrible evil corporation, when there's thousands of decent, community-loving people that work there, one of whom made this error, more than likely by simple carelessness. It's not that big of a deal, it's not a showstopper by any means, and will be a simple fix in due time, almost undoubtedly. There are people behind software, but a lot of commenters seem to think it's professionally appropriate to just shit on things because they're from Microsoft or because they're from Apple, or wherever. Just say you don't like Microsoft, or that you don't like Apple. It's so antisocial to take the stance I keep seeing. I think the young people call this "parasocial" these days. Back in my day, we called it "fanatics", where there's this unhealthy obsession and seemingly anthromorphized view of corporations and institutions where hundreds or thousands of different, varied, diverse groups of people are all cohesively accomplishing or building things. It dismisses nuance, it rejects common sense understanding of how teams of people work, and is reductive and hostile to actually intelligent conversations about products and ideas.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Devil's advocate: I don't think blocking bleeding-edge browsers is necessarily "stupidity." If you're smart enough to understand all the caveats of running a bleeding edge software program, you're smart enough to change your user agent string. If you're not, you have no business running nightly, and you're probably going to generate a lot of "yOuR sITE is BRokEN!" support emails / forum posts / bug reports for other projects, and conspiratorial posts screeching on social media. I see this all the time - people who run dev branches/nightlies/alphas and have the QA skills of a turnip who have no business doing so...and of course they're noisy as hell and waste a lot of people's times. If you don't know the most basic points of QA and how to file a bug report that doesn't waste people's time, stop running anything beyond "stable" or betas marked specifically for public consumption. You're not "cooler" or more 133t running nightly releases.

usea 4y ago
People can run whatever software they want. They don't need your permission, or to know how to file a bug report, or whatever other bullshit you've dreamed up. They're also allowed to complain when a site is broken in their browser. If you don't want to see unsophisticated complaints and bug reports, then you need to stop looking at them. Perhaps find a different profession/hobby where your user-hostile attitude actually benefits someone.
- dcow 4y ago
  It’s also simply not true that more user-facing bugs happen on nightlies. I run nightlies at times and have never found them to be less stable in any tangible way that would affect site usability and show up in a bug report. On the contrary, nightlies are the first to get important bug fixes. It’s overwhelmingly likely that GP is just a lazy audacious dickwad ignoring valid bug reports.
- curtisblaine 4y ago
  To be honest, they don't need to find a different profession / hobby, as long as their user hostile attitude makes them money.
- 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does. “We are the smartest developers in the world” I’m told used to be something you heard on campus, presumably during the recruiting process, and in the board room. But if the Justice department comes knocking, they turn into Steve Urkel. You can’t have it both ways, and they “accidentally” break too many things that earn them millions of dollars. It’s not stupidity, it might not be malice, but if not malice then thoughtlessness or arrogance.

Cpoll 4y ago
> Microsoft has a long and storied history of claiming superior business acumen when it suits their narrative, and then incompetence when that does. Not to say that they don't play dirty, but this isn't actually a contradiction. When you hire 100k workers, you're going to have the smartest developers in the world AND the Urkels. And odds are the smart developers aren't being put to work on the login page.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Peer pressure, oversight and processes are supposed to prevent a group of people from becoming more than the sum of their worst parts. Microsoft has always found a way to become the sum of the worst instead of the average or the intersection. They only stopped outwardly projecting that behavior for a while after the EU dropped sanctions on their asses. But that was four rounds of promotions ago so that’s all forgotten now.
- croes 4y ago
  First of all, Urkel is actually a genius, so it doesn't fit. Second, if you know you have better and worse programmers you either control the work of the latter or you don't ket them work at your entry. Nobody sees the work of your smart programmers if nobody could login. So either MS is a lot dumber than I thought or they just don't care because they no most people can't or don't want replace MS software.
- clcaev 4y ago

pas 4y ago

it's even worse than stupidity. it's all done in the name of UX. Apple style. please use the "supported" browser. they did the same with web Skype.

bubblethink 4y ago

>This to me looks like stupidity more than malice Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from malice.

tanseydavid 4y ago
Well-played! <golf-clap>