Hi, I'm Alex Monfort (Ofihombre).

I have recently noticed that in Firefox has blocked downloads from itch.io, and it appears with the following text:

Blocked page

An error occurred connecting to w3g3a5v6.ssl.hwcdn.net.

This is an example of what has happened to me. The strange thing is that this hasn't happened to me with games prior to July 2023, and even if you set your browser to allow Pop-ups, it keeps giving me locks.

And also mentioned with a link that is very different from the one on the download page (like w3g3a5v6.ssl.hwcdn.net.). It is as if the newest itch.io games weren't hosted on itch.io's own servers and were on other servers of dubious origin, and that the browser considers them as "malware nests", and still blocks them.

Anyway, both Chrome and Itch app this error doesn't happen, and it only happens in Firefox. We would have to contact Mozilla to find out about this problem.

I cannot tell why this happens, but it probably is some malconfigured security setting inside Firefox. Maybe in combination with a malconfigured upload (or download requrest!)  that Chrome will catch, but FF does not.

Try this when ff shows the blocked page warning.

Show source.

Save page as  and name it as a zip.

If the page really were blocked, ff would not have downloaded it all. So it is less a blocking, and more of a ff not realizing, it should download the thing, instead of displaying it.

just noticed this happening today - reeeeally annoying >_<

This is  still happening to me, using Firefox in Australia. I contacted support and they replied:

 "There appear to be no issues accessing the download for your page. It’s possible there was a temporary outage with our CDN. Remember, download URLs are generated when the download button is clicked and expire shortly after to prevent hot linking. Ensure visitors access the file by visiting the page and clicking the download button, rather than sharing a direct link to our CDN."

I also encountered that issue with my Ludum Dare entry (https://entrusc.itch.io/ship-in-a-bubble-ld54). I set it to donation based for now so that the downloads work everywhere.

@itch.io: you really have to look into that, as this is really an issue. But it seems it does not happen for all free games though.