Comment by drnick1

There's no point unless a critical mass of people use these tools. You will be the only one on your IP address using this configuration of masked fingerprinting, which is itself a fingerprint.

That's also why it's indeed useful when using Tor, because you're not identified by your base IP.

Unless we make this part of the culture, you have basically 0 recourse to browser fingerprinting except using Tor. Which can itself still be a useful fingerprint depending on the context.

EDIT: I'll add that using these tools outside of normal browsing use can be useful for obfuscating who's doing specific browsing, but it should be emphasized that using fingerprinting masking in isolation all the time is nearly as useful as not using them at all.

> Basically, it makes Firefox expose the same information as the Tor browser.

Is it based on the Tor browser?

Some solutions, like Tor browser or GrapheneOS, are engineered for the purpose.

Some free online tools are an aggregation of ideas from social media and someone's personal understanding. These solutions can have limited benefits or be worse than the problem. Many settings don't work as expected, there are unintended consequences (such as making the browser more unique and easier to fingerprint), unusual combinations of settings can have unintended consequences or break things (Mozilla can't test every combination of about:config settings).

Does it hide GPU name that is exposed via WebGL/WebGPU? Does it hide internal IP address, available via WebRTC?

> block all third party content

It's not going to work, because the fingerprinting script can be (and is often served) from first-party domain.

Also imagine if browser didn't provide drawing API for canvas (if you would have to ship your own wasm rendering library). Canvas would become useless for fingerprinting and its usage would drop manyfold. And the browser would have less code and smaller attack surface.

All javascript based anti-fingerprinting is detectable and is also a major source of uniqueness!

Orion Browser (Kagi Product) prevents fingerprinters from running by default.

https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/preventing-...

unfamiliar with the Arkenfox user.js but are any of these things that are beyond what firefox enables out of the box if you turn on privacy.resistFingerprinting ? Because what you describe seems to be all stuff it does just by flipping flag.

As someone who utilizes these tools for anti-fraud purposes, Firefox is just as trackable if not more trackable than Chrome (especially because you stand out by using a niche browser in the first place).

Firefox exposes a massive amount of identifiable information via canvas, audio device and feature detection methods. There's also active methods to detect private windows, use of the developer console and more.

"This will break a lot of websites, but automatically rules out most forms of tracking…"

Whether one breaks a lot of websites or not depends on the type of user one is. People who regularly use the Google ecosystem, Amazon and Social Media etc. cannot afford to break sites for obvious reasons, they too are those that websites are most interested in tracking and fingerprinting.

Those who use the web in the way advertisers and Big Tech intend users to use it are the most vulnerable, they're the ones who most need protection.

I break websites regularly but it doesn't worry me, I browse with the premise that there are more websites on the internet than I'll ever be able to visit and if I break sites or are blocked by paywalls then there are usually alternatives and workarounds.

But then I'm not a typical user, I block ads, I usually browse with JS off, kill cookies, use block lists, use multiple browsers (there are six on this deGoogled, rooted phone), browse from multiple machines—Windows, Linux and use multiple ISPs. Also, I've no Social media or Google accounts and rarely ever purchase stuff online. Internet access is via dynamic IP addresses and routers are rebooted often. There's more but you get the picture.

I assume browsing sans JS makes me a first-class target for fingerprinting and that websites know about me but it doesn't matter. Whatever I'm doing seems to work, over the years I've had very little trouble doing everything on the web that I want to do. Clearly I'm of little interest to advertisers and I never see ads let alone targeted ones. I used to use uBlock Origin but I don't bother now as browsing sans JS is just so effective at blocking ads.

I'm lucky in the fact that I use no service that would benefit from fingerprinting me. Whilst my web browsing is atypical of most users I reckon many could benefit by being more proactive—using multiple machines, browsers, ISPs etc.—to disrupt the outflow of personal data. For example, this is being written on a rooted Android using Privacy Browser from F-Droid sans JS and with block lists. If I really need to go to a site where JS is required, I can simply hit a toggle and turn on JS or alternatively use another browser.

There is also server side fingerprinting like JA4+ and others. Also, if you somehow evade fingeprinting, you have to prepare yourself to solve some very slow Google and Cloudflare captchas.

>Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets in terms of privacy.

No. It's LARP. You either don't care or go with Tor Browser and/or commercial antidetect browsers.

But you shouldn't care, this issue of fingerprinting is overblown. (really reminds me of AI)