Twitter has always been good for developers, except for those who’d like to embed anything – hence making it possible to interact with their contents on other sites than Twitter. I guess it’s understandable, but they seem to hate anyone trying to embed feeds, searches or anything on their sites. And they express their hate by making the developers’ lives more difficult… This time by silently breaking the embed script in a way, that’s tricky to work around.
The Problem
In February 2018, Twitter announced that their widgets will start rendering fallback markup on IE9 and IE10 “in the near future”. Since SharePoint 2013 and 2016 are locked in document mode of IE 10 (i.e. using IE on SharePoint sites causes the user agent to be roughly that of IE10), that means trouble for SharePoint admins. Basically everyone, who’s using Twitter embeds on SharePoint, will be seeing empty feeds henceforth.
Well, save for SharePoint Online users, since SharePoint Online renders in whatever mode Microsoft chooses that week! For them, Twitter feeds will act like erratically, and I feel bad for whomever has to debug the behavior!
Anyway – that change’s immediate effects were surprisingly small. Widgets still rendered, until roughly 2 weeks ago (early May 2018). We started getting reports of Twitter being utterly broken – the embed being completely empty without any fallback rendering whatsoever. What’s worse, the embed fails silently, without any errors anywhere. Looking at the code, it looks like it just checks the user agent and ends the execution – thanks a lot, Twitter, much appreciated!
What’s even worse, is that it applies to IE11 users, too – if they’re in SharePoint, or on a site that’s running in compatibility mode (such as all sites on “intranet” zone). And since IE seems to be most actively used in large organizations, especially on internal communication channels, Twitter just decided to block the majority of IE users in the world from accessing their service via embeds.
Great.
Luckily, there’s a dirty hack for this situation!
