Microsoft famously fired their entire QA team. Also… their technical writing team. And then they outsourced both support and the bulk of their development to India.
You get what you pay for, and right now Microsoft is variously paying either zero or very little.
It's double outsourced even. They outsource to Accenture who then outsources it to small companies.
It's really really annoying because these people get penalised for escalating and they don't know much more than what it says in the docs. I read those before contacting them and it's always a hassle to get my case through to real support. They'll stall forever asking for more logs and more tests. I feel like I'm on trial defending that I really have a problem. Not a valued customer.
And mind you, this is already meant to be the "premium" support tier.
At this point I think it's par for the course. There must be some support tiers where you'll get actual Microsoft employees deal with your issues (I don't think Apple's devs get a random contractor reading a script when they report server issues), but short of that I would feel lucky to even get a human to look at the question.
Now that you mention malice, here's a smoking gun, from the linked bug report:
> (it's not an issue with Firefox's implementation. This can be demonstrated by spoofing the useragent as a Chromium-based browser and attempting the same login flow […]).
File an FTC complaint. This is potentially anti competitive behavior with a digital paper trail. Microsoft will ignore randos, so engage a regulator. Include the bugzilla post link in the complaint.
I don't think this is a smoking gun at all, because we don't know the story of why the difference in behavior was implemented. What not-infrequently happens is that Firefox is late to add support for some new web standard, so sites gate their usage on the user agent (which indicates that they actually bothered to test on Firefox!), and then it takes time for them to get around to removing the check after Firefox adds support.
In fact it's not completely unlikely that that is what happened here. Firefox still has incomplete support for the web authentication API [1], and in particular FIDO2 devices did not work if a PIN is set until Firefox 114 - only a few months ago! I'm not sure if this could be related, but Firefox also still does not support passkeys [2], so I'm sure someone will get blamed for anti-competitive behavior for that at some point.
Changing behavior based on user agent is necessarily intentional on the part of Microsoft.
That check lies somewhere along the line between "having the direct goal of breaking authentication flow (pure malice)" and "is a completely legitimate programming error (pure incompetence)."
I am not ready to assume pure incompetence (and here's where I might be wrong).
Ah I see, I thought the parent poster meant malice on the part of Mozilla, got confused by bouncing between comment threads. I could see malice, since it is Microsoft, but what's the "why" of it? I don't really see any motivation that M$ would have to block Mozilla, all it's going to do is piss off users. It's not like people are gonna get fed up and switch to Edge, they'll get fed up and switch to Chrome. If anything, M$ has a great incentive to improve Firefox adoption. The market that uses FF is the same market that is never going to choose Edge. FF and Edge both have a much better position if they can damage Chrome's market share.
Office 365 Calendar broke for me a few weeks back and is still unusable. It forcibly leaps me weeks ahead whenever I try to scroll to today’s date. I literally cannot view my work calendar on my phone anymore.
I often wonder if they’re even capable of knowing there’s an issue.
