this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 422 points 2 months ago (36 children)
[–] [email protected] 135 points 2 months ago (34 children)

Advertisers track you with device fingerprinting and behaviour profiling now. Firefox doesn't do much to obscure the more advanced methods of tracking.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly would be hard to do. There a perfectly legitimate and everyday uses for pretty much everything used in fingerprinting. Taking them away or obscuring them in one way or another would break so much.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Librewolf has Resist Fingerprinting which comes pretty far.

Every Librewolf browser uses the same windows user agent, etc. But there are downsides, like time zones don't work, and sites don't use dark mode by default.

And even then, EFF's Cover Your Tracks site can still uniquely identify me, mainly through window size. That's one of the reasons why Tor Browser uses letterboxing to make the window size consistent.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Librewolf supports letterboxing as well, though the setting might be disabled by default

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Oh neat! I just tried it, and it seems it's broken on Gnome when using 125% scaling though :/ Still cool to have the feature!

I also just figured out how to expose dark mode and my timezone though with RFP, which is useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't know what letterboxing is. But if window size is used to identify me, can't it be circumvented simply by using the window in restored size, and not maximised?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your restored window size is even more unique than your maximised window size!

The correct solution is to just not make the window size available to JS or to remotes at all. There's no reason to ever need specifics on window size other than CSS media-queries, and those can be done via profiles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But the restored size keeps changing - can't be profiled, right?

And how do I not make the size available "to JS or to remote"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Changing the source code of the browser, unfortunately. I don't know what Tor Browser does or how, but basically you'd have to do about the same as they do.

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