Maybe they've stopped supporting my version of FireFox on Linux, and I've wrongly assumed it's strictly the lack of js? I'm not sure if that's any better... since this browser is perfectly capable of everything needed to view tweets.
I never used a popular browser to read tweets in the past. I was using mobile.twitter.com leading up to this change; this is no longer possible. AFAICT what has changed is that they are requiring an "approved" user-agent string. Someone here on HN tried Googlebot and it worked. I just tested it and it is still working. There are other strings that work. You definitely do not need javascript to read Twitter.