Birds in their little nests...

Still on the tech FUBAR front, let’s talk Twitter. Several months ago, @jack and his minions decided that what desktop users really, really wanted is a mobile interface. They’ve been forcibly rolling it out since about the beginning of the year. It hit me in the Spring, and it drove me wild.

It makes it more difficult to follow threads (as in the app, clicking on a tweet takes you to a new page, not a pop-out on the page you’re on), so you have to toggle back. Twitter chats have become excruciatingly tedious. It also, for some unknown reason, puts the Close X button on the upper left corner, when every other application in the universe has it on the upper right. It keeps defaulting to “Home”, meaning the tweets Twitter’s algo thinks I ought to see; apparently the fact that every single time I find myself at “Home” I click on “Latest Tweets” is meaningless to them. Since the transition I’ve been unable to see how many tweets I or anyone else have posted. And I see this several times a day, including every single time I click on a Twitter link on another site:

In short, it’s a load of shite.

Earlier this year there were some tricks on how to revert to Old Twitter. But by the time I found them, Twitter had plugged the loopholes.

However, over the weekend I checked the Webs again, and discovered a couple of new workarounds, including one that—blissfully—worked for me. Let me preface the solution by sharing a photo on the Reddit discussion that saved me:

Clearly, I am not alone in my loathing of #NewTwitterIsNewCoke.

The discussion is here, and the steps from @Bill_Clinton69 that worked are thus:

“Go to about:config. Then you right click and hit New -> String. Then put in general.useragent.override.twitter.com in the preference name and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko in the string value.

“Also be sure to reset your cookies for Twitter.”

I had to re-sign in to all my accounts after clearing cookies, but seeing that old interface on Twitter was totally worth it. (Although Twitter will probably close this option at some point.)

Now—about that common cold…