X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

Twitter loads some javascript file from edgecastcdn.net and twimg.com. The browser blocks these loads because they are from third–party domains which is a big risk. Loading a script from a third party exposes anything secret or private on the page to the third party. Of course twimg.com is _probably_ owned and operated by Twitter, but it could be anyone. They’re not even registered through the same registrar, they have different registrant information, etc, etc. One is reported to be in Arizona, the other in California.

This is exactly how information about you is leaked to advertisers. Maybe the scripts you load from those third–party domains are harmless, or maybe they send everything you see and type back to the third party.

There is javascript on the page that detects the failure and puts up the error message blaming the browser. Really the browser is taking a completely legitimate action, and Twitter could get around it by simply hosting all of their javascript on the same domain that you visit. If you visit x.com it would load javascript from x.com. But if you visit twitter.com, it would load the same javascript files from twitter.com urls instead. Or twitter.com could just redirect you to x.com. Either way, the problem would be solved. But by asking you to turn off strict browsing mode, it enables Twitter to load javascript from real third parties that just want to advertise to you.

malicious action on xitter.

just like google forcing browsers to send full referrer cross domain by strong arming w3c with chrome. because their business model depends on full referrer cross domain.

xitter decided it's business model depends on third party cookies. so they're strong arming users into enabling it on the browser globally.

everything is simple. there's no complex technological reason for any of those things. it's all access to your data and money.

the browser is the battle ground and they win every single time.

I don't know specifically for X/Twitter, but typically it isn't actively malicious but instead just bad programming. The JS is written in a way that breaks when the <tracking/ad/whatever is blocked> fails to load.

This is a complete guess, but it could have to do with the twitter.com -> x.com migration. Still trying to load twitter.com assets, which are now third party.

Sorry, what's LTI?

"works as designed. will not fix."

I’m gonna take your words at face value and ask you a question: what do you gain in gettin access to that news a few minutes in advance?

> when media still reported "an incident." The difference is wild.

The difference is that the media goes to some lengths to make sure the footage they're showing is actually real. Every day on Twitter I see people posting alleged war footage from different conflict zones of the world, and in a non trivial, sometimes majority of cases it turns out the footage is either fake or from some unrelated conflict, or years old but presented as new. The person pointing that out usually has a tenth of the interactions than the original poster.

Twitter is neither providing analysis or news but simply the media equivalent of pornography.

There was an earthquake the other day, people were talking about it on both Mastodon and Bluesky, twitter didn’t even have a mention until after it was over.

Whatever it is on Twitter, it’s a very specific subset of news, usually the kind you also see on breaking news banners in other outlets. Twitter has long been abandoned by everyone of consequence.

> Twitter is by far the best source of news and analysis currently.

It no longer is that. The "For You" algorithm is just... bad. You get worse news than from the worst of the most biased/filtered/uncaring/whatever-your-definition-of-bad-is media.

Is it news if you have no idea if it's true or not ?

And I think it's all the more relevant as we can instantly generate plausible pictures and reporting only from vague knowledge of the circumstances.

So your definition of "best" news is fastest available?

Source? I can still use twitter.com normally on Firefox.

Firefox partitions (and soon blocks) 3rd party cookies by default. That means they can't be used for cross-site tracking. Also not across different top level sites belonging to Twitter / X. The entity configuration for ETP does not change anything here.

The bug we fixed was in ETP, an older mechanism in Firefox, which blocks cookie access for known trackers, based on a list. Only for that mechanism we consider a hand full of domains by Twitter / X to be the same party. This is so we e.g. don't block their CDN if you're on x.com. We still block them on sites not belonging to Twitter / X. This is especially relevant for ETP strict which does not only block cookie and storage access, but also blocks 3rd party loads from known trackers altogether. If we block Twitter's CDN on x.com the site breaks.

"Para-social" is fine and in fact how it was written when it was coined in 1956.

I think Twitter will probably remain popular for a long time, especially for people with a more right leaning perspective on the world. That's not really the people I associate with, and it probably needs to be mentioned here that I'm Danish. Which matters because the sort of people who post right leaning stuff here are kind of your crazy uncle on Facebook kind of people. Which means that Danish Twitter is slowly becoming a like an actual Facebook feed where the only people who post are the ones you'd likely associate with if you're here on HN. Even if you're conservative, because it's just so crazy and hateful.

I personally wish people were heading for Mastodon. I especially think that our institutions should operate Mastodon instances on their own, so that an American tech giant can't decide to "cancel" a Danish politician as an example. I mean, I don't agree with anything our far right does on social media, but the concept of a foreign tech giant being able to ban an elected Danish official is still sort of crazy. Anyway, people are going to Threads for the most part.

Note that this is a perspective from my little point of the world. Though some of our major news media have decided to ditch Twitter, as well as closing their posts on Facebook to comments.

I doubt the general public uses Firefox with strict tracking turned on (unfortunately)

Mastodon doesn't have a fraction of the ground sources that Twitter has. You go to Twitter because that's where the people who know shit and tell you about shit are. It has nothing to do with Twitter itself. It's just network effects.

I get why you're annoyed at Twitter (Elon) - I am too, and I still call it Twitter - but there just doesn't exist anything like Twitter. It's the only place where you can ask CEOs and CTOs questions directly. Where you can learn about what is actually happening on the ground in Ukraine from first hand reports from people who are there. Where you hear subject matter experts debating strongly in favor and against all matter of topics. It's sad that it's the only place like it, but it is.

> The problem is the sites.

no, the problem is that sites can _afford_ to block firefox, because their share is low enough that they can take the hit.

What we need to do, as tech evangalists, is to push the marketshare of firefox higher, so that they cannot be ignored by sites, due to significant traffic. This is how the open internet can preserve both privacy and control of the computing environment.

if your friends and/or family isn't using firefox (this includes mobile), nag them to switch. If you are a tech support for your extended family, push firefox onto them (and install adblock while you're at it).

If you control a company's IT infrastructure, push firefox as the default browser, over chrome.

The internet is repeating the microsoft IE days with chrome, but without the shittiness that made chrome a possible barrier breaker (chrome is good enough that most people aren't complaining).

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

If important people would just quit fucking using it, it wouldn't be an important site.

Unfortunately, and astoundingly, nobody has bothered to create anything remotely competitive with Xitter, even at this late date.

Yes, but now I can’t convince my family to use Firefox because it makes part of the internet unusable which is a deal breaker to them.

Doesn’t matter if it’s the sites that are the problem, Firefox has lost momentum to such a degree that sites don’t care anymore. So they should tread carefully with features like this.

I don't think most people in the world would agree with your definition of important. Perhaps you believe that's a good thing anyways. Not sure where I was going with that.

That's great, most websites can afford to give the middle to finger to Firefox but not to all the Apple devices out there.

Do you log in to the site with Firefox Focus?

Every single company that wants to have an official account

if that were the case, i wouldn't have such problems with client certificates.

It also does a few other things, such as reporting your timezone as UTC instead of the real value. It’s an attempt to reduce the number of things that sites can use to distinguish you from other users.