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Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#451

Post by heavyset_go »

ImaCake wrote: post #344
mitchdoogle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people think Firefox doesn't work? I've noticed zero difference between using Firefox and Chrome and I've used both daily for five years or so.

I suspect the problem is that firefox sometimes performs poorly. But most power users don't see this problem because they either have firefox when it performs well or because they have a powerful computer. For reasons I cannot understand, firefox on my 8GB RAM windows surface eats up huge amounts of memory. But it uses very little RAM with the same profile on my much more powerful desktop.

Some extensions have memory leaks. There might be a discrepancy between the extensions you have installed or their versions.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#452

Post by heavyset_go »

WorldMaker wrote: post #301
ric2b wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.

There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo). You can add things like YouTube…

Firefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1].

What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support

[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#453

Post by ffpip »

mderazon wrote: post #328
ffpip wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove Etags with the CleanURL addons. Just turn off everything else it does, if you only want to remove ETag. Clean URL cleans many links. No utm_source, no amazon trackers, no google/yandex changing links just right before you click it. It has adblock built in, so turn it off if you already have an adblocker. You can also do it with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-party...

Wow first time I read about etag tracking. The creativity of adtech companies is really impressive

Yeah. Almost every site uses it now.

Check whether you can be tracked here - https://hinternesch.com/page1

Visit the site. Then clear cookies and history (don't touch cache) . Then return and you will get the same ID, provided you are not using any extension that removes the E-Tags.

I learnt about the possibilities of Etags from here - https://privacy-formula.com/reader/no-cookies-no-problem-usi...

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#454

Post by zamadatix »

ffpip wrote: post #208
blueagle7 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for this? Is it for a specific website?

All addon users/stats are public on addons.mozilla.org. So number of (uBO + ABP users)/ Firefox users is probably 33%. So that might be where it is coming from

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

"Has addon" metric. uBO + ABP is far less than 33%.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#455

Post by floatingatoll »

globular-toast wrote: post #426
surround wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While these addons may help against help prevent some fingerprinting attempts, they do not adequately reduce the fingerprint to be non-unique. They certainly won’t hurt, though (many websites just take a hash of the canvas). It’s very difficult to have a non-unique fingerprint. Your browser would have to be the exactly the same as a bunch of other people. At the moment (AFAIK), this is only possible with Tor (all Tor…

> At the moment (AFAIK), this is only possible with Tor (all Tor users have the same browser fingerprint.) I fail to see how Tor affects your browser fingerprint. Are you talking about a "tor browser" or something?

“Tor Browser” is a browser released and updated by the Tor Project.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#456

Post by floatingatoll »

danShumway wrote: post #275
xvector wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox already includes many of these, some of those plugins are redundant or unnecessary.

> already includes many of these Make sure you turn them on though! Firefox by default doesn't block canvas fingerprinting, that's a setting you need to enable in `about:config` under the `privacy.resistFingerprinting` section.

If you’re considering resistFingerprinting, you might be better off using Tor Browser, which maximizes fingerprinting protections regardless of breakage to websites. I believe that the Tor folks share patches sometimes that get integrated into the Firefox rF pref, but you would only want to enable rF if you’re looking for the best possible protection regardless of other desires (such as addons or fonts or being able to access all websites), and for that, there’s Tor Browser.

(Or, if you’re just interested in helping advance the anti-tracking ecosystem! In which case you can test resistFingerprinting and file Webcompat issues when you encounter them — but be sure to mention that resistFingerprinting is enabled or your issues will probably be closed “unable to reproduce”.)

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#457

Post by WorldMaker »

heavyset_go wrote: post #452
WorldMaker wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo). You can add things like YouTube…

Firefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1]. What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support [2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

My understanding is that Firefox still uses the OpenSearch metadata shallowly as the easiest way to create the "keyword search bookmarks" rather than writing a bookmark by hand (though your second link was what I was looking for on how to do that and it seems quite easy/convenient to do yourself if you had to). I don't believe that shallow auto-bookmark discovery is/will be dropped, they dropped a more complicated add-on/extension-based approach that supported more OpenSearch features.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#458

Post by asddubs »

squarefoot wrote: post #331
mderazon wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow didn't know that. Do you have a source? How do they decide which captcha is harder ?

The parent used wrong phrasing but it's real. The captchas don't become harder to solve but longer. If Google detects you're blocking trackers (or possibly cookies) it will throw at you an huge number of captchas until you give up. Imagine having to click like 12 panels of street lights, cars, bicycles, trucks, buses, etc. sometimes multiple times. This is getting out of control, really. I miss so much the Web 1.0 fr…

the worst part is when cloudflare puts you on their shitlist and you have to fill out these dumb captchas for 6 minutes before you can even access just about half of the sites on the internet

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#459

Post by asddubs »

smichel17 wrote: post #437
lebaux wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using vivaldi, and it seems that https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-fingerprint-m... extension is able to block most of the fingerprinting attempts. If you guys know about better "plug-in" solution, please let me know. I don't want to sacrifice basic comfort of browsing though, like disabling .js, wiping everything on browser restart or diddling with uMatrix on every website.

I made a nicely written comment, then accidentally deleted it, so here's the super pithy version with examples omitted, since I don't want to retype on my phone. I use uMatrix with strict defaults for privacy. I agree diddling is annoying. I find diddling with sites more annoying.

it does make you appreciate it a lot more when someone has their shit together, if the site works with noscript and doesn't pull in scripts from 20 different hosts

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#460

Post by stuartd »

smichel17 wrote: post #434
stuartd wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used privacy.resistFingerprinting until I realized that was the reason websites were displaying times incorrectly, as they receive the default timezone value of UTC - [0] - and I couldn't find a way around it. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330890

That's a feature, not a bug. Your time zone is one of the ways you can be fingerprinted. That said, it wouldn't hurt to split it out into a different about:config preference. I'd probably disable it since I don't use a vpn so my time zone can be deduced from my IP anyway.

I know it’s a feature, but even sites which allow you to set a timezone (eg Slack) still displayed times incorrectly. It was a tradeoff I was not prepared to make.
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