Firefox expands fingerprint protections • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#171

Post by yborg » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #107

yborg wrote: post #56

In my case the single largest contributor to my fingerprint is ... canvas size. I run full screen with a custom Firefox setup that basically makes my canvas size unique :/ The "protection" Firefox uses for this is to always open a new window at a default size, which does nothing in my case since my toolbar config still makes the canvas size unique. It would be really useful to have something that dithers the reported…

to defeat canvas size fingerprinting in firefox: about:config -> set privacy.resistFingerprinting to true about:config -> create new boolean key privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing set to true this will set your canvas to a common size which fits in the viewport and display a grey "letterbox" border in the surrounding space.

Doesn't seem to work... reported canvas size is still some odd value (2200x1283x24). I think it uses a fixed size for the letterbox, which is useless. Right general idea though.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#172

Post by baranul » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

modin wrote: post #147

tlavoie wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Temporary Containers" extension is great here, allowing pretty easy compromise between different buckets of sites. I'll have some personal ones that I log into, others go specifically into a snoop container, and the rest get temporary ones that evaporate when closed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

stoically, the maintainer and creator of this extension unfortunately passed in early 2023. There's a new fork available[0], linked from github[1]. I briefly discussed this extension and how to proceed after the passing of a maintainer with Mozilla staff in their Extensions and People teams at FOSDEM this year, but there was no real procedures in place at the time of our chat. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/fi…

Yes, that's truly sad that he passed. It is fortunate that he left that open-source project, where others can pick up the torch. As the forks continue, it becomes a small tribute to him.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#173

Post by godelski » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #164

godelski wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your take is quite naïve. The problem is that Google is controlling all the protocols. We're already in a situation where chrome, and consequently chromium, is "the most up to date browser" because Google has a heavy influence in dictating what those standards are. This is, of course, why people fork chromium in the first place, because it gives them a leg up not needing to build everything from scratch and allows th…

>if they get to dictate how all the roads get used and how all the maps are made? That power comes from the market share of Chrome, the product. It doesn't come from the market share of blink, the browser engine. If you want to challenge the power of Google you need an alternate product, and not an alternate browser engine. Maintaining an opinionated fork is cheaper than maintaining an alternate browser engine. This…

  > you need an alternate product, and not an alternate browser engine.

Sorry?

The engine is what reads the protocols. It's how the internet is navigated. It is... the car to the road.

  > Maintaining an opinionated fork is cheaper than maintaining an alternate browser engine

I believe I EXPLICITLY mentioned this.

  > This allows you to invest more resources into the product

Incorrect.

It allows you to invest more time into a different aspect of the product. A browser isn't just a UI interface. It isn't just the style of the car. It isn't just the paint job. Chromium browsers are like taking the engine and drive train, chassis, power train, and suspension out of one car and putting it into a new body. Sure, that's a different car and saves you a lot of time and effort but the cars are going to have very similar performance and capabilities.

Let's put it this way. If Jeep was the dominating car company and decided all cars have good suspension and then Jeep, due to their "expertise in cars" got an unequal say in how roads were designed, then they might want to do things like make roads more rough and bumpy because their cars can handle it and a Porche couldn't. Does that make roads a better place? For everyone? No, that just kills Jeep's competition, further embeds their market dominance, and let's them dictate a critical part of our infrastructure.

You're so focused on the trees you've missed that they're part of a forest.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#174

Post by port11 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 8:07 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #92

port11 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a commenter some time back showing that browser statistics were easy to skew. Safari and Firefox are less likely to show up in analytics, so website owners think they're less important than they really are. Conflating client-side with server-side analytics showed quite a gap.

Most of the people who are just looking at browser statistics for the purpose of managing a website are using simple tools that just simply collect data from user agent strings. Determining browser from this isn't 100% straightforward, but it's enough to give website operators a rough idea of what browser to target. This data was more important in the days when everything wasn't Chrome/Android/iOS, and it actually ma…

I don't disagree, but it makes for bad web development practices. Google Analytics is still the de facto king everywhere I've worked, but it's going to more often Safari and Firefox than other browsers due to tracking protections and users being more likely to run ad blockers. Then there's all the edge cases like Brave.

I don't remember the discrepancy that the study found, but it's significant.

So… we keep optimising for Chrome, as if that's the bulk of our audience. That makes things shittier for everybody else, and we think it's okay because they're such a small part of the group. This reminds me of a former client burning almost 9 million euros every year because they excluded IE6–8 from their reporting, yet they would account for 15% of the traffic.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#175

Post by vablings » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

philipallstar wrote: post #165

wtallis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"not gating information behind said sign-ups" was in the context of regulations like GDPR. You twisted that into "People should do work for free" which is not at all the meaning of what you replied to.

GDPR is nothing to do with stopping locking info behind a signup. Not at all. People lock info behind a signup if they want to to monetise. Something stopping that is forcing advertising as the monetisation strategy, or else saying people should work for free.

Specifically, my concept is not having to fork over personal information to get access to "free content" I could have worded that better, its either free or you pay and if you pay with your information each sale of your information should be recorded and legible

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#176

Post by vablings » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #49

vablings wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>The browser ultimately sends only what the webpage requests. You've got 6 layers under your browser before that data is sent -- some of those are useful for fingerprinting. Also, browser behavior and feature sets are not and likely will never be 100% uniform. > GDPR to make it illegal for browsers to track this information Unfortunately the internet is global and people outside of the reach of those jurisdictions ca…

Browser behavior and feature sets are mostly uniform apart from some specific semantics. Companies like Google should absolutely be anti-trusted out of owning the Chrome Browser and it should be required that because you are "selling a browser" you must inform each user of the transaction of data

When I say selling, I mean that in the truest form. Google chrome isn't free; you just pay with your data rather than your wallet. You as a consumer should retain the full ownership and access/control of your data and that should be legible in a way you can inspect exactly what's going on. I think it would really wake up a lot of privacy folk to what actually goes on with people's data and things like facebooks Onavo VPN is more visible

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#177

Post by rogueparitybit » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #98

rogueparitybit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently switched from Containerise + Temporary Containers to Auto Containers. Brand new addon, but the dev is responsive and IMO it works much better for creating new containers on the fly as you browse. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-containe... https://github.com/Shajirr/FF-Auto-Containers

That's really handy! I like that it handles domains automatically Edit: Seems to break ad blocking and there's some issues with login. Such as adding a container for YouTube requires also doing *.google.com since that's how the login is handled. Interesting and I'll keep playing around with it

It uses the existing FF container functionality, so uBlock should not be affected. I also use uBlock and haven't noticed anything bizarre. Maybe you just used YouTube right before a necessary update to uBlock's filters got loaded.

Regarding login, it's a struggle with any container addon. But I like how this one makes it easier. It streamlines it a bit because you can right click the page and go to Auto Containers -> Exclude tab from domain exclusions, then login as normal and add each intermediate domain to the container's URL patterns. It would be nice if the dev could add a way to record all intermediate domains and add them at the end; sometimes I miss one or two due to an auto-redirect.