Mozilla shares fix for Twitter not working on Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla shares fix for Twitter not working on Firefox

bleepingcomputer.com

20 pointsnewman3147 comments

Disabling service workers. Can somebody explain in one sentence to a non-web programmer what are service workers and why disabling them can improve functionality?

Yes, disabling a cache can improve functionality if you have coherency bugs.

Anecdotally I have heard service workers can be misused to do crypto-mining in people's browsers. Not that I believe Twitter would try that, but more dodgy sites.

An http proxy a website can install for itself. It allows it to control the caching behaviour programmatically (choose which requests go to the server, which are satisfied by the cache, and choosing to eagerly add certain resources to the cache). This is mainly used to make web applications (especially PWAs) work offline.

I know service workers are used for PWAs and notifications, among other uses.

There's an internal webpage in most browsers that shows you what service workers you have installed (Firefox: "about:serviceworkers"). The answer is a lot, because every web page you visit can install one without your permission. They seem like small javascript applets, and I'm not sure under what conditions they are allowed to run. I am afraid they could be allowed to run even when you are not visiting the page, and since I have no interest in PWAs or notifications I just disabled service workers entirely. You can do that in about:config.

I can confirm that:

(1) This happens in desktop Firefox.

(2) A hard-reload of the page causes the Twitter page to load correctly.

(3) The technique suggested in the article actually works. Note that there may be multiple entries in Firefox's service workers list for Twitter's regular site, mobile site, etc. I had a total of three.

I'm not sure I'm on board with telling users that you can fix this issue by disabling all service workers without telling them that some functionality on other sites might not work as they expect afterwards, because it depended on a service worker.

I'm also curious why, given this seems to be triggered by Firefox reacting suboptimally to a service worker error, Twitter haven't done something to fix their service worker. Is Firefox's usage really that low now? Sad times.

The article does not detail steps on how to disable all service workers, though. It only explains how to unregister the existing twitter service workers. I assume twitter goes and re-registers a new one, once you visit twitter.com again.

It only works in incognito for me.

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