Firefox Expands Fingerprint Protections

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protections/

88•ptrhvns•1h ago

Comments

xnx•59m ago

This is a good use of Firefox resources. Unfortunately Firefox is at a natural disadvantage for fingerprinting by virtue of being used by such a small number of users.

prism56•57m ago

Interesting. So when you try resist fingerprinting. If you dont go all the way you're at risk of making your differentiations smaller?

kube-system•46m ago

As an oversimplified example:

If a website has 100 visitors, and 99 of them use Chrome, and 1 user uses Firefox, it doesn't matter how good their fingerprinting resistance is, they're always the one using Firefox.

https://xkcd.com/1105/

NoboruWataya•44m ago

I often think about this in connection with my user agent. I am sure it helps identify me. If I spoofed a Chrome/Windows UA that would probably be better from a privacy perspective. But if we all do that then web designers will never know that we exist. I want people to know there are Firefox and Linux users out there.

kube-system•40m ago

Spoofed UAs are easily detected. And if you are spoofing your UA you are among a very small subset of users.

cluckindan•55m ago

It’s a bit annoying that Firefox by default breaks all sites that use canvas imageData API. There is no permission for that, so no user-friendly way to ask for consent either.

y-c-o-m-b•53m ago

I exclusively use private browsing, but I know that doesn't do much in preventing tracking, so it's nice to see this finally starting to roll out.

The fact that I have to go to great lengths to browse anonymously - and companies desperately try to circumvent my genuine decision to opt out of their tracking - tells me everything I need to know about those companies. Words like sleezy, shady, and predatory come to mind.

I would love to see this taken one step further and have states/countries prevent companies from tracking me altogether if I reject their cookies, but I fear it's more likely those companies will lobby to prevent Firefox from protecting us.

nalekberov•19m ago

It’s more like Firefox try to be “different” than other browsers, in other words they want to become Apple of browsers.

Fingerprinting is nearly impossible to resist these days anyways, no matter which technics Firefox uses to reduce it, and sometimes it actually makes the browser appear more unique.

Last time I tried everything I could to prevent Firefox from calling home, it was still requesting Mozilla servers. Though I haven’t given up, my plan is disabling it at source code level and build my own release.

vablings•10m ago

I think this is a nihilistic view. The browser ultimately sends only what the webpage requests. If we gut the ability for websites to request large swathes of information such as every supported TLS Cipher suite and also better protections such as GDPR to make it illegal for browsers to track this information unless a user signs up and also not gating information behind said sign-ups

dmix•49m ago

I use FF and I paid for NYTimes. I was logged in, yet NYTimes constantly flagged my browser with a persistent captcha I couldn't bypass for months (across 2 different machines). It thought I was a bot because of the privacy features. So I cancelled my subscription using my phone.

Esophagus4•47m ago

Ha - I thought you were gonna say you switched browsers.

dmix•44m ago

I just found a way to bypass the paywall on a web browser when I want to read an article. Which I figured was a easier solution than emailing customer service over a technical matter (never fun).

deltoidmaximus•42m ago

Is there a reason to force all these bot checks on logged in accounts that are paying you money other than insanity? Surely you could just have a max monthly bandwidth limit per account and just stop worrying about this?

rpdillon•37m ago

The New York Times is like a microcosm of the publishing industry. They seem to spend the majority of their effort on protecting their intellectual property. I'd rather they use those resources to improve their reporting, particularly about technical topics, but alas.

nutjob2•35m ago

Just use Bypass Paywalls Clean. Paying for a subscription is up to you.

shevy-java•42m ago

I tested firefox recently. It had some AI summary button or something that was new. I instantly wanted to eliminate this from the UI but I don't know how to do that. I guess it is possible? But it probably requires some time and research; the thing I don't need or want this, it just takes away space.

Then I remembered why I no longer use firefox. I believe we, as users, need to take back the open web. The days of some random developers ruining the UI should really be over, be it firefox, or Google chrome killing ublock origin. We need to fight back.

cowpig•39m ago

I use Firefox because it is better than Chrome, which is the only alternative I see.

Do you use something else?

rpdillon•36m ago

LibreWolf, Iron Fox, and Brave are all worth a look, I think.

messe•36m ago

Not the commenter you're replying to, but I've been using LibreWolf for the last few months.

It's a bit more privacy focused, so may need some tweaking to your liking (by default it won't persist history, zoom levels, cookies, etc.)

SoftTalker•3m ago

Almost all "alternative" browsers are Chromium based or Gecko/Firefox based. If there are any that are truly scratch-built other than the text-based browsers such as lynx or w3m I'd be interested to hear about them. I'd guess they are extremely limited in features.

perihelions•38m ago

I agree with your comment, but to resolve the question it's "browser.ml.chat.enabled". A common topic on HN,

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=browser%20ml%20chat&type=all

charcircuit•23m ago

>Having a unique fingerprint means fingerprinters can continuously identify you invisibly

This is not right. If you have a unique fingerprint every time someone tries to fingerprint you, then they have to do extra work to try and figure out which are the same. If you make it always be the same you've made the fingerprinter's job much easier.

cjkaminski•15m ago

Agreed. And this technique becomes more effective as the number of people using it increases. It's easy to match up randomized fingerprints if only one person is doing it, but quite hard when thousands or millions are doing it.

Bender•18m ago

On the topic of Firefox fingerprinting, how does one edit the NetworkID in about:networking#networkid without creating new profiles or user accounts?

instagib•11m ago

One thing I found that broke tracking algorithms was the ‘every tab is a new random profile’ extension. I can’t remember the name as I haven’t used it in a while and it broke a lot of logins.

They could not build a profile on you and it would break their system of tracking user login per device.

DavideNL•9m ago

You probably mean Temporary Containers…?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Fokamul•3m ago

I dev my private fork of browser fingerprinting bypass and I can tell, this is like 1% of what commercial tracking companies use for fingerprinting.

Unless they tackle all the hidden things, all artifacts, canvas rendering and many more.

These companies will be actually happy after this change, because even users with ublock and other plugins, will think they're not tracked. Yeah, nope.

And it's not that hard to see how they fingerprint your browser, reverse any JS tracking script yourself and see.