Resolved: "Blocked" error when accessing reddit.com on Firefox

https://www.reddit.com/r/shittychangelog/comments/s42bw6/we_have_blocked_all_traffic_originating_from/

Enjoy!

Seriously.

git commit -m “Site has error with browser. Blocking entire browser #Fixed”

git push origin master

Unfortunately, I think I can't really expand on this much more as traffic management techniques are too abuse-adjacent

I'm very curious about this as well. My assumption was that it was something to do with the HTTP transport itself, like maybe there's one pervasive bot behavior that happens to exhibit the same timing or header ordering or something as Firefox.

Or maybe what they thought was an error rate due to bots was actually an error rate due to an HTTP spec violation/assumption on Reddit's side that was causing increased issues with Firefox.

When I was checking on my end I could see that some of the fields in the request header were different between Chrome and Firefox I couldn't check them all as I refreshed the page and it was working again.

Sounds like reddit needs to overhaul its change management system if something like this was allowed into production that should've been easily caught in a smoke test but wasn't.

From the analysis in the Firefox bug tracker, it was related to cipersuite selection, which differs between the browsers (including Edge/Chrome) and curl/openSSL.

Only think I can think of is something at the SSL layer.

Firefox users are the most likely to be viewing fewer ads. I noticed that on Chromium UBlock works differently; I can view ("promoted posts" on Chrome, while old.reddit on Firefox does not display those ads.

I wonder how many here use old reddit instead of www

Probably some user-agent spoofing, or TLS cipher suite ordering that was blocked.

Root cause analysis: it's a process to find the core of issue and implement other processes to ensure this exact issue (and hopefully many similar ones) don't happen again.

Here: Root Cause was some security change (likely in the SSL validation stack) that cause Firefox to crash. So in the future, when SSL validation changes occur, ensure adequate testing occurs on Firefox to prevent this from happening again.

brave is chromium based

firefox nightly + ublock origin + universal bypass works 10 times better than brave

Brave blocks ads so it can show its own ads..

It has also secretly inserted its own referral codes to e.g. links to cryptocurrency exchanges.

It's also deep in the crypto bubble.

I don't trust it one bit. Privacy, security and so on are just a way for them to get people to their own ad and tracking platform.

Do plants fart??

If nothing else, I can guarantee you that this is not true!

Thank you!

Nah trust me, a lot of people tried spoofing the User Agent and it did not work for them either. I even took a look at the request headers to make sure I was pretending to be Chrome. It's likely that the error just happened to get fixed after you changed your UA, but a lot of people now think that or disabling HTTP3 fixed it when it was most likely unrelated.

Interesting! Just to verify, after checking that Reddit worked when accessed through Android, did you try accessing it through the desktop as well? In which case, did it keep failing or not? If it didn't it's possible you just happened to try that when the issue got fixed. If it did fail, maybe there's a discrepancy between Firefox's CA list in mobile vs desktop? Otherwise I guess it's back to square one, in which case I hope the devs can do a quick post mortem!