Tell HN: Twitter/X is inaccessible to all Firefox users by default
Twitter has started changing over its URLs to X.com as the default URL now.
However, this has left Firefox unable to access the site by default.
You will instead get a message about "Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot."
This seems to be due to the manual allowlists FF has as part of the "Enhanced Tracking Protection" feature. It doesn't know that X.com should have access to the Twitter image distribution URLs and other non X.com URLs, so the page load fails. X access can be restored by turning off Enhanced Tracking Protection.
The Twitter engineering lead is asking for anyone who has a direct line to FF staff: https://x.com/cambridgemike/status/1790615764736913557
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Serve the images from the same domain.
I know Twitter probably fired the people who knew this entirely predictable outcome was likely, but like, they should have seen this coming.
The reason you see CORS errors in the Network tab in Firefox when Enhanced Tracking is enabled, is because Firefox sux and can't render a correct error message. They simply have manual hardcoded lists for blacklisting, just because they have it (and probably they implement it by faking a CORS failure).
It correctly identifies that Twitter is trying to load a tracking site, which Firefox blocks by default (with an allowlist). Instead of hating on Firefox, hate on Chrome and other browser vendors that don't go to the effort of maintaining a blocklist to protect their customers privacy (or implementing support for an existing blocklist, in the case of Brave)
lol
"Hey browser vendor, our owner woke up one day and decided to change our name for the lulz and then fired most of the company... now we don't know what to do. Halp?"