If you tried to access OneDrive and OneDrive for Business from a Linux computer recently, you may have noticed that the web apps can be really slow on any web browser. Microsoft has finally acknowledged the issue, and a company’s spokesperson explained on Hacker News that the sluggishness was “not intentional.” (via ZDNet).
More importantly, the OneDrive bug should now be a thing of the past: the company discovered that the issue was caused by the web app not using prefetching optimization on Linux machines. The spokesperson shared more technical details below:
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. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.
According to the spokesperson, the issue was resolved as of Tuesday, March 22nd. “We will definitely ensure that more Linux testing is done,” he added. If you encountered this issue in the past few weeks, let us know in the comments if you see any improvements since Microsoft officially fixed it.
