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Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users harder to fingerprint (blog.mozilla.org)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/firefox@fedia.io
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[–] 11 points 3 days ago (11 children)

If you want to be harder to fingerprint in Firefox, use LibreWolf.

https://librewolf.net/

I do wonder whether Firefox can now do this without severely restricting website functionality, though. Leaving on fingerprint resistance in LibreWolf hobbles many sites.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    I tried it for like half an hour. 15 minutes of which i spent on capchas. It is unusable on a lot of the Internet

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 child)

    What does your browser identify as when you run a fingerprint test? Because if it still claims youre running Firefox or librewolf, that is basically all the fingerprint they need to get you. The ff/lw market share is basically a fingerprint of its own.

    edit: Tested Librewolf, fresh install, but turned up all the anti-fingerprinting stuff got uniquely fingerprinted by https://amiunique.org/ . I dont know what the anti-fingerprinting stuff does, but its not even close to enough.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    I guess Whonix VM and Mullvad browser with it's VPN are the only working anti-fingerprinting tools so far. It's genuinely that difficult to get anti-fingerprinting right, because there are like a bazillion ways to get fingerprinted.

    And personally I just stopped bothering with anti-fingerprinting because of this. I think I did my fair share of hurting the mass surveillance machine by getting a few contacts to Signal, occasionally using AdNauseum, and donating a bit to Graphene OS. Might as well let myself be fingerprinted now.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (6 children) 
    $ sudo apt install librewolf
[sudo: authenticate] Password: 
Error: Unable to locate package librewolf

    Still waiting for it to show up in the official Debian (or Ubuntu) repositories. I'm aware that they publish to their own repository that they recommend adding to your system, but I don't want to taint my install like that.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Use a flatpak

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (3 children)

    Of course there are other ways I could install it, but that's beside the point. Normal Free Software belongs in distros' package repositories.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    That means you expect the software to have a manteiner for every single distro, each with their own hurdles.

    That's exactly the point flatpaks and appimages are solving, and how it seems things are going moving forward.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    They also provide

    • an extra level of sandboxing/isolation for security
    • isolation of the package's dependencies from your base OS for stability

    Not for all software, but for many office/productivity/internet tools, I ❤️ flatpak

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    I agree, while they aren't perfect, using apps like FlatSeal to toggle and remove permissions for Flatpak apps is a lot easier than writing firejail or brwap configs for standard apps.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago*

    You could spin up an Arch or Fedora distrobox, install it in that, and then create link for it to your host system (easily done with a gui app like BoxBuddy if you're allergic to CLI). No noticable overhead.

    I think there's a flatpak too?

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    • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    tl;dr on how to implement this?

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