Microsoft has fixed an issue affecting OneDrive on Linux, where many users were reporting that the service slowed down to a crawl upon access.
The problem was initially posted on a Microsoft forum, where OneDrive for Business was found to be sluggish on Linux when accessed using a browser like Chrome or Firefox. However, if users try to access OneDrive on a Windows computer under the same connection, the service works as expected.
It was also noted by some that if the browser’s user-agent string (text sent by a browser to the site to identify the browser and OS) to either Internet Explorer or Edge, the service speeds up. Of course, this made users on Linux think that Microsoft was giving priority to its homemade browsers, leaving others in the dust. The issue also became a hot discussion topic on reddit, with the same complaints raised.
Microsoft recently addressed the issue in a Hacker News thread, saying that it had been fixed since March 22. The post by Edgar from the OneDrive team reads:
We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms (iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows), but for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue. Rest assured that this was not intentional. It was an oversight.
The prefetching optimization was disabled, and it will be enabled again soon after an update for StaticLoad.aspx has been tested on Linux and released.
A moderator on the Microsoft Community also acknowledged the fix:
Hello everyone,
Thank you for posting this in the community. Some people may have previously experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. We want to inform you that this issue has been fully resolved.
Thanks,
Michelle V.
Office Team
For those utilizing OneDrive on Linux, are you still experiencing slowdown issues when trying to access the service from the browser? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Hacker News
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