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Comment by Lievelingsduif | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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, 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".

> 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?

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.

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