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> Fingerprints use information that’s gathered passively from your browser such as the version number, operating system, screen resolution, language, list of br

by gkya 9y ago

> Fingerprints use information that’s gathered passively from your browser such as the version number, operating system, screen resolution, language, list of browser plugins and the list of fonts you have installed. Why any of this information, apart from the screen resolution and the language (assuming it's the Accept-Language header's contents), is accessible to the web pages anyways?

icebraining 9y ago
Browser plugins was useful to know what to serve the client. I think the list of fonts was IE-only, although you could try to detect them by setting the font of a piece of text and checking if the size of the rendered text changed. The version and OS are part of the User-Agent, and the idea was also to allow the server to send the most appropriate/compatible version of the page.
phkahler 9y ago
>> apart from the screen resolution Remember when HTML first came about? The whole idea was that the browser would re-flow everything to fit on whatever resolution you had. Lots of sites hired writers, editors, and design people from the print world and tags were abused and added so those people could control the layout like they were used to doing instead of adapting to a better way. SVG scales and doesn't require the site to know your resolution. We've really screwed up by allowing the browser developers to pander to site developers and give them access to the kingdom. Now that we can all see the folly in that, it's time to reverse the trend for the next 20 years.
incompatible 9y ago
Agreed, it seems to me Firefox doesn't need to tell every site that I'm using "X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0" right in the request header. That's surely a bit help with fingerprinting. Perhaps the sites could figure it out anyway with more effort, but at least force them to make the effort.
- hsivonen 9y ago
  We tried to get rid of the Ubuntu bit years ago but failed. Ubuntu has an incentive to broadcast that users are using the Ubuntu-shipped Firefox. Basically everyone who ships a browser wants to shout: “Look at me! I have market share!” Many sites vary native-code downloads by platform, so removing OS/CPU would cause unhappiness there.

by gkya 9y ago

icebraining 9y ago

Browser plugins was useful to know what to serve the client. I think the list of fonts was IE-only, although you could try to detect them by setting the font of a piece of text and checking if the size of the rendered text changed. The version and OS are part of the User-Agent, and the idea was also to allow the server to send the most appropriate/compatible version of the page.

phkahler 9y ago

>> apart from the screen resolution Remember when HTML first came about? The whole idea was that the browser would re-flow everything to fit on whatever resolution you had. Lots of sites hired writers, editors, and design people from the print world and tags were abused and added so those people could control the layout like they were used to doing instead of adapting to a better way. SVG scales and doesn't require the site to know your resolution. We've really screwed up by allowing the browser developers to pander to site developers and give them access to the kingdom. Now that we can all see the folly in that, it's time to reverse the trend for the next 20 years.

incompatible 9y ago

Agreed, it seems to me Firefox doesn't need to tell every site that I'm using "X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0" right in the request header. That's surely a bit help with fingerprinting. Perhaps the sites could figure it out anyway with more effort, but at least force them to make the effort.

hsivonen 9y ago
We tried to get rid of the Ubuntu bit years ago but failed. Ubuntu has an incentive to broadcast that users are using the Ubuntu-shipped Firefox. Basically everyone who ships a browser wants to shout: “Look at me! I have market share!” Many sites vary native-code downloads by platform, so removing OS/CPU would cause unhappiness there.