I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.

Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.

TL;DR I am a nerd.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • Having JS disabled is very rare for non-bot traffic, so you stand out far more. It isn’t about uniqueness, you are already unique if you aren’t using Tor/Mullvad browser(s). While disabling JS protects against certain kinds of fingerprinting, there is pure CSS and TCP fingerprinting. Firefox RFP (eg. Librewolf) and whatever Cromite or Brave have help to protect against much of JS fingerprinting. You are only ever going to fool naive scripts which these browsers already do a good job of that.

    As for security, having JS disabled is a benefit. Just know since you will very likely have to enable to again quite often for random websites, you’ll become used to doing that to the point that it may as well be useless. If a random website doesn’t load just leave it, unless it is worthy of some actual trust. Even more useful would be setting up uBlock Origin with a blocking mode, such as medium or hard.


  • It still gives metrics. And yes, Creepjs is not very useful against randomized values, though I noted it still because Brave fails (resulting in a persistent fingerprint) whereas Cromite succeeded to fool Creepjs. Both have many methods of fingerprinting protection.

    Checking the fingerprinting protections of Mullvad and Tor is better done with TorZillaPrint test page by Arkenfox. It is optimized to tell you whether you blend in correctly with RFP normalized values.





  • TL;DR The only way to avoid a near unique fingerprint is Tor Browser

    Longer explanation: There are too many styles of fingerprinting protections: randomized and normalized.

    Librewolf inherits its fingerprint protections from Firefox (which intern was upstreamed from the Tor uplift project. It works by taking as many fingerprintable characteristics (refresh rate, canvas, resolution, theme, timezone, etc) and normalizes them to a static value to be shared by all browsers using the feature (privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config). The benefit of normalizing is you appear more generic, though there are many limitations (biggest of which is OS because you cant hide that). The purpose design of these protections stems from the anonymization strategy of Tor which is to blend in with all other users so no individual can be differentiated based on identifiers. Since Librewolf has different a default settings profile to Tor (or Mullvad) and even vanilla Firefox with RFP enabled, the best you can hope is to blend in with other Librewolf users (which you really cant, especially if you install extensions or change [some] specific settings). Instead, the goal is just to fool naive fingerprinting scripts, nation states or any skilled adversary is out of the scope.

    Brave (or Cromite) uses the strategy of randomizing fingerprintable characteristics. This is only meant to fool naive FP scripts but in my opinion (when done right) is better at fooling naive scripts. The biggest problem is that these attempts by other browsers and not as comprehensive as Firefox. I think Cromite does a better job than Brave: it is the only browser which fools Creepjs that I have tried by creating a new FP on refresh. Cromite required some configuring to get to place I wanted it, but so does every browser.

    The advantage with Firefox forks is that vanilla Firefox has RFP and therefore so do the forks (though most dont enable), but you dont blend i with a crowd (making it far less effective than MB or Tor). The advantage of Brave or Cromite is a randomized FP, bit since it isnt upstreamed (and Google will never do that) you stand out like a sore thumb. Either way is fine though for basically everyone.

    The only browsers I know that work against Creepjs are as follows:

    • Mullvad (persistent FP)
    • Tor (persistent FP)
    • Cromite (randomized FP)