Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy

https://andrewmarder.net/firefox/

by amarder • 11 months ago

267 141 11 months ago

andrewmarder.net

dotcoma• 11 months ago

Shouldn’t Firefox come hardened out of the box ?

amarder3• 11 months ago

Yes, but a lot of Mozilla's money comes from Google. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

502083• 11 months ago

Isn't that just to provide the search engine default? Which is easily changed?

jdlshore• 11 months ago

There’s tradeoffs between privacy and convenience. Mozilla makes a particular set of tradeoffs, based on their judgment of what the average user will put up with; checklists like this allow you to make more aggressive tradeoffs.

502083• 11 months ago

That would be a great move by Mozilla. Have a "secure" version: Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Firefox SECURE. Or maybe just provide a switch to turn on.

542458• 11 months ago

90% of the stuff in the OP will break certain sites… The problem is that non-technical users will think “oh, privacy, that’s good” (which it is, don’t get me wrong), click the “max privacy” option, but then be unable to fix things when they don’t work and switch back to Chrome.

amarder3• 11 months ago

This checklist is a work in progress, would love to hear your feedback.

Bender• 11 months ago

Good work. There are some hardening options that you may be able to glean from ArkenFox [1] and Betterfox [2]. Another addon to consider listing is CSS Exfil protection [3a] CSS Exfil Test Site [3b].

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

[2] https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox

[3a] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-exfil-pro...

[3b] - https://www.mike-gualtieri.com/css-exfil-vulnerability-teste...

amarder3• 11 months ago

Awesome, will check these out, thank you!

trod12344• 11 months ago

This is quite a rudimentary checklist, and it won't provide much in terms of privacy protections, but it will break a number of sites.

The current state of browser-fingerprinting is off-the-rails, where they deny service if they don't get those fingerprints, and the browser to a lesser degree has had its securities/privacy protections gradually degraded.

Stock Firefox will not be able to provide any sufficient guarantees. There are patches that need to be re-compiled in, because there have been about:config options removed.

I highly suggest you review Arkenfox's work, most of the hardening feature he recommends will provide a better defense than nothing. He regularly also contributes to the Mullvad browser which implements most of his hardening and then some but also has some differentiation from the Tor Browser, but many of the same protections.

The TL;DR of the problemscope is that there are artifacts that must be randomized within a certain range. There are also artifacts that must be non-distinct so as to not provide entropy for identification (system fonts and such that are shared among many people in a cohort).

JS, and several other components, if its active will negate a lot of the defenses that have been developed to-date.

Additionally, it seems that in some regional localities Eclipse attacks may be happening (multi-path transparent MITM), by terminating encryption early or through Raptor.

At a bare minimum, there seem to be some bad actors that have mixed themselves into the root pki pool. I've seen valid issued Google Trust certs floating around that were not authorized by the owner of the SAN being visited, and it was transparent and targeted to that blog, but its also happened with vendors (providing VOIP related telco services).

It seems Some ISPs may be doing this to collect sensitive data for surveillance capitalism or other unknown malign purposes. In either case TLS can't be trusted.

ranger_danger2• 11 months ago

JS, and several other components, if its active will negate a lot of the defenses that have been developed to-date.

I thought if you disabled JS, then that would greatly narrow down which user on the internet you are, since very few people (in comparison to everyone else in the world) actually do this.

not authorized by the owner of the SAN being visited

Source?

TLS can't be trusted

Do you have more info on this? Why are more people not worried about it?

michaelt• 11 months ago

I've seen valid issued Google Trust certs floating around that were not authorized by the owner of the SAN being visited

Did you confirm with the owner that they were unauthorized?

And can you point to the certificates in the Certificate Transparency logs?

mmphosis2• 11 months ago

https://librewolf.net/

https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/src/branch/master/li...

backscratches4• 11 months ago

Librefox is the most robust/maintained fork I've come across.

speckx• 11 months ago

Also have a look at https://ffprofile.com/

jvdvegt• 11 months ago

Nice site, thanks!

frm882• 11 months ago

Thank you, this helps a lot.

touristtam• 11 months ago

NoScript to automatically disable JS on first load, something to deal with Cookies (like cookie auto delete) and making use of MultiAccount containers. (defo privacy badger installed as well).

usr1106• 11 months ago

I have used Cookie Auto delete for years. Last time I checked development seemed to have stalled.

arcfour• 11 months ago

Personally I leave the anonymous daily usage ping enabled in the (perhaps naive) hope that my use of Firefox being counted might help keep it afloat/popular. I guess that's not really in the spirit of a privacy-focused hardening guide but it is something that some may wish to consider.

Some may argue that the data that is included is a bit much for a "daily usage ping," an assertion that I won't dispute—but I will say that I appreciate the fact that Firefox even provides this level of transparency in the first place:

https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...

ris2• 11 months ago

Disable WebGL. Not in a funny javascripty extension, in about:config.

tremon2• 11 months ago

Do you have an authoritative link for how to do so? The wisdom of the web seems to alternatively refer to webgl.disabled, webgl.disable-wgl or webgl.enable-webgl2 . I know I can simply disable them all, but I still like to know why there's three toggles and what each one covers.

david_draco• 11 months ago

I'm surprised Firefox Multi-Account Containers isn't mentioned. Seems ideal to me to keep Web Universes separate.

mixmastamyk5• 11 months ago

There are things I also do like removing sponsored links on the about page and url bar. Also disable type-ahead to search engine.

My understanding is that Privacy Badger no longer learns by default. I never wanted that, just block known things, like search engine click hijacks.

I’m not sure what to do about the user agent header. Changing or simplifying it tends to break sites. Also I’d like to promote Linux there but that’s at odds with privacy.

mixmastamyk5• 11 months ago

Sorry, not the about page, the newtab page.

temp08263• 11 months ago

I just want something (config or extension or instructions or whatever) to give me the best (rather, most common/average) fingerprint possible according to that EFF tool. Does that exist?

olivergregory3• 11 months ago

That’s the extension Privacy Badger.

HelloUsername• 11 months ago

Privacy Badger

UBO is enough; https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...

efilife• 11 months ago

This probably won't be perfect on the EFF tool but try arkenfox

temp08263• 11 months ago

I think it just makes me a little sad that despite the effort I've put in, that tool (called Cover Your Tracks btw, or other ones like amiunique) still report that I am indeed unique.

ranger_danger2• 11 months ago

IMO the EFF tool is a bad test because it only compares you against other people that have used the tool.

A better test would be CreepJS in my opinion: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

I'm not aware of any FOSS browser setup that can actually result in a random FP ID shown in creepjs on every page load (please prove me wrong).

henrixd• 11 months ago

You have to choose from one of two strategies, either you go with tor-browser (also includes Mulvad-browser) route and try make your browser indistinguishable from others or you randomize values to make stable fingerprinting impossible.

When trying to be similar to everyone else, even small changes to the browser, like changing window size, can make you easily identifiable from everyone else. Randomizing will allow you to modify your browser. None of the fingerprinting protections matter if you use your browser and session to login to some sites.

I use multiple browsers. One is for login to sites and tor-browser is for most of my browsing.

This is easily the best fingerprinting extension that I have found so far: https://jshelter.org/

temp08263• 11 months ago

I think you're right with having a two-browser setup and I actually want to give it a spin. I envision I'll need to change some habits but it really does seem like the cleanest way to go about it.

olivergregory3• 11 months ago

Set the browser.ml.chat.enabled and browser.ml.enabled to false as they intensively use the processor and drain the battery. All that to just find the best name for your tab groups. I prefer to have my laptop last one more hour instead.

yunruse• 11 months ago

I took a brief gander at its code [0] and saw it mainly focusses on k-means clustering algorithms (in JS, no less). To my ken this is likely for suggesting new tabs, something a user is even less likely to use than renaming them.

Its constant drain even when not 'in use' seems to imply it's classifying tabs as they change page (though it might be telemetry or uncommented testing). If so, it's an example of premature optimisation gone very wrong.

It's a shame, because it overshadows the fact that naming tab groups is a perfect use case for an LLM, alongside keyboard suggestions and reverse dictionaries [1]. I'm ardently distrustful of LLMs for many, many purposes, but for the tiny parameter and token usage needed it's hard to not like. Which is a shame it's (somehow) such a drain.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/7b42e629fdef... exports a SmartTabGroupingManager, though how or why that is used without being asked eludes me

[1] https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ Can be helpful in a pinch when a word's on the tip of your tongue, though its synonyms aren't always perfect.

squigz• 11 months ago

Does anyone here struggle so much with naming a group of tabs that you'd reach for an LLM? I mean... really? How often does a group of tabs need a more complex name than "Work", "Gaming", etc? Maybe a suffix for the work project?

aragilar• 11 months ago

I recall an extension (I think by a Mozilla dev) which could do automatic grouping of tabs (back before tab groups was removed). I'm surprised this hasn't come back.

Vinnl• 11 months ago

People drew their own conclusions about the drain being caused by tab group suggestions, but that wasn't the cause: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982278#c4

marc_abonce2• 11 months ago

I didn't know about this 2 settings but they were already disabled in my about:config. I wonder if Debian distributes a non-default about:config with Firefox.

tremon2• 11 months ago

They do, see /etc/firefox-esr/firefox-esr.js -- but the aforementioned settings are not in that file by default, and [0] seems to suggest Debian does not alter the compiled-in defaults either.

Some quick digging in the source suggests that it's simply not enabled by default in ESR 128. I don't know if that's because it's only enabled by default in a later release, or because it's disabled in all ESR releases; I suspect the former. Compare [1] and [2]:

  -pref("browser.ml.enable", false); # in upstream/128.14.0esr
  +pref("browser.ml.enable", true); # in upstream/142.0.1

The other pref, browser.ml.chat.enable[d] is not mentioned in that file at all.

(edit: according to [3a] and [3b], it's browser.ml.enable and browser.ml.chat.enabled... yay for consistency, I guess)

[0] https://sources.debian.org/src/firefox-esr/128.14.0esr-1~deb...

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team/firefox/-/blame/upstre...

[2] https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team/firefox/-/blame/upstre...

[3a] https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team/firefox/-/blame/esr128...

[3b] https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team/firefox/-/blame/esr128...

st3fan• 11 months ago

Wasn't that a bug that was fixed weeks ago? Like early August? If you are not averse to this feature then it is better to simply make sure you are running the latest version.

olivergregory3• 11 months ago

I litterally gained one hour off my charged battery when I switched these two settings off, just a week ago, and I keep my browser up to date. So not for me.

neobrain• 11 months ago

It was also caught during progressive rollout, i.e. it never affected anyone who had disabled "studies" in their preferences.

piskov2• 11 months ago

After the shit Mozilla pulled with ad/tracking this summer, the first step for improved privacy should be to delete firefox and switch to brave / what have you.

creesch3• 11 months ago

switch to brave

Fun suggestion to switch to a browser that has a company behind it that has pulled a lot of shady stuff related to ads and tracking. A company where privacy is more marketing than a core value.

Edit: Since people are going to ask anyway, here is an article that covers a lot of the shady stuff brave pulled https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

If you are one of those folks who don't care about the political arguments, feel free to skip over paragraph one and two. Paragraph three till ten cover actual shady stuff done by brave the company itself.

There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only support specific extensions. Which sounds okay in theory until you realize how they did so. Without involving the extension creator they would fork a version of the extension and bake that into Brave. They did so without informing the extension creator, meanwhile users would still go to the extension creator for support who couldn't fix a thing.

Every time one of these things come up, the Brave team either is irked (but changes it anyway) or goes "oh, yeah we'll remove it in the future". This to me indicates a company culture where there is no thinking ahead about the impact of features or where they simply don't care as long as they aren't called out on it.

This consistent pattern over a period of years has, to me anyway, shown that issues such as privacy or even being user centered are not a core part of their thinking but merely a marketing gimmick.

And to be ahead of the curve on some other things I have heard people say over this. Just that Mozilla sucks doesn't mean alternatives can't be worse.

piskov2• 11 months ago

Could you actually cite some from Brave’s privacy policy (as firefox has now) to corroborate these claims

frm882• 11 months ago

Thank you for that article. I've considered Nobara 42 for my new PC but it comes with Brave as the only browser capable of VSS and now I'm worried.

antonok• 11 months ago

Are you referring to the Manifest V2 extensions supported by Brave? The original extension creators were made fully aware of those plans ahead of time and have been in contact with Brave since then, e.g.:

https://github.com/hackademix/noscript/issues/359 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/discussions/29... https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/41173#issuecom...

I'm not sure how you can interpret forking open source codebases as a "shady" behavior (it's one of the most important reasons to use open source in the first place), but in this case there is a high demand for said extensions and Brave has provided the only way to continue doing so on a Chromium rendering engine.

(I am one of the devs who worked on the spec for this feature)

backscratches4• 11 months ago

A fork of Firefox like librewolf is even better incentives I think

geekamongus• 11 months ago

I've been a Firefox die-hard since it was called Phoenix a couple decades ago. That said, over the last two months I've been testing Orion Browser (from Kagi, to which I subscribe), and am smitten with it. It's Apple only at the moment, which is a drawback, but if you live in that ecosphere, it's worth a look.

Orion is Webkit-based, can install extensions from Chrome OR Firefox, privacy respecting, and a whole lotta niceties for per-website tweaks and other customizations.

[0] https://kagi.com/orion/

iknowstuff• 11 months ago

I just need it to stop using Safari’s slow ass animation for the two-finger trackpad swipe back gesture

thisislife2• 11 months ago

Orion indeed is a decent option for the privacy conscious as it is one of the few browsers that doesn't make any automated connections on startup (with the right config). But, if I remember right, they are still trying to get Ublock Origin to work perfectly on it (i.e. WebExtension support is still not fully supported on Orion).

PaleMoon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) is a hard fork of Firefox, with a mix of old tech (XUL) and new tech (from current codebase of Gecko), that is another full-featured zero-telemetry browser that doesn't make any automated connections. But on this too, the full features of uBlock Origin isn't supported as it is based on the abandoned uBlock Origin (legacy) codebase (though the legacy codebase has been updated by some PaleMoon developers, the original developers of uBlock Origin do not wish to support PaleMoon as it doesn't support WebExtension.

Then there's the Tor Browser ( https://www.torproject.org/ ) - it is a soft fork of Firefox, that supports the Tor network and has been configured by default to be "privacy hardened" - it has none of the crap that Mozilla bundles into Firefox, like Pocket, AI, Ads etc. The Tor software bundled in it can be easily deleted, to use it as privacy hardened Firefox. However, there are two issues with it - it does make unauthorised and unwanted automated connections (to SecureDrop) and you can no longer remove the NoScript browser extension that is bundled in it (you could from previous versions). When a browser maker forcefully bundles something in it, (however useful it may be), and does not allow you to modify it, that's well-founded ground to be suspicious of it. (Note: I did finally figure out that one can stop automated phoning to SecureDrop, after disabling it in about:rulesets ).

As the tor browser laid a good foundation to create a privacy hardened Firefox, there are many other browsers that are Forks of the Tor browser - the Mullvad Browser ( https://mullvad.net/en/browser ) is a popular one, and Mullvad bundles its VPN service in it instead of the Tor network. Last I checked, it made some automated connections on startup, so I didn't bother to explore it further).

noman-land2• 11 months ago

Curious you specified "hard" fork. What exactly would a soft fork look like for a git repo?

navigate8310• 11 months ago

Or use LibreWolf and call it a day.

mixmastamyk5• 11 months ago

It’s not directly in popular distributions unfortunately.

backscratches4• 11 months ago

True but the next best thing is arkenfox which is even more of a pain. Librefox makes a lot of the flags toggleable/visible in settings which is convenient too.

pndy2• 11 months ago

It's available as flatpak for a while - if that changes anything

Dwedit3• 11 months ago

Librewolf randomizes your time zone data on every page load, screwing with websites. It's on by default, and can be turned off.

502083• 11 months ago

Thanks for this ... great start. Mozilla Firefox COULD be an even more powerful source for good. Stop focusing on BS VPN, AI, etc ... focus on great browser, security, privacy. There is a possible niche for a centrally managed, security focused browser for companies ... like the Island Browser ... as an option.

userbinator3• 11 months ago

If the first item isn't "whitelist JS", you're doing it wrong. So many problems arise from letting any site run programs on your computer that it's best to reserve the privilege to the most trusted of sites.

stusmall• 11 months ago

Meanwhile if I see that I just move on. It just isn't practical to have a workable browser with JS whitelisting for the general case. I doubt people who do this actually do any kind of thoughtful review before hitting "accept". It just adds manual toil with limited benefit.

If they are doing meaningful review, I question how much they actually get done in life.

braiamp• 11 months ago

I have NoScript by default set to no run. Some sites work better without it.

mixmastamyk5• 11 months ago

You only have to whitelist your top sites once, not every day.

userbinator3• 11 months ago

It's quite telling that even the mobile version of Chrome, well known for being the most user-hostile browser, has the option to whitelist or blacklist JS and various other features like location access.

Chrome didn't have anything other than a global JS on/off at first, so they clearly added this feature later.

Sophira4• 11 months ago

When it was developed, uMatrix was a brilliant method of being cautious about what runs, and it had a logger so you could easily see what domains you should enable the current domain to have access to.

I still use it honestly, but I'll need to move on at some point - not just because it's MV2-only, but also I've found a way in which uMatrix can be bypassed if a website were to specifically target it. (It doesn't affect uBlock Origin, although I haven't tested the Lite MV3 version.)

1oooqooq2• 11 months ago

and it's trivial to do with uBlock.

it have both a global option to disable js, and a option to set a keyboard shortcut to reenable as needed for each site.

elcapitan• 11 months ago

I have also found that since using Noscript that way and only whitelisting the few sites I actually use interactively, now because all the Cookie warning garbage, clicking away of subscribe dialogs etc is gone, all in all I do less manual annoying interaction on sites I visit.

1oooqooq2• 11 months ago

remember that "firefox -p" opens the profile manager so you can have one profile without the last two items on that list, just for when you need one or two sites that have broken login code that requires 3rd party cookie (it's always for malicious reasons rather than incompetence, but if you have to login you have to login)

panarky• 11 months ago

Hypersegregate browsing with profiles.

One profile for banks, a different profile for Amazon, a third profile for Google sites, a fourth for news sites I log into, a fifth for news sites I don't log into, a sixth that automatically forgets everything on exit for sites that UBO breaks.

Then delete all data on each profile periodically, weekly for news sites, monthly for Amazon and banking sites.

It's a giant pain in the ass juggling all these profiles. Seems like there should be a browser that automatically and transparently isolates every site in its own profile.

pndy2• 11 months ago

Mozilla introduced new profile manager for Firefox somewhere around May. This thing uses new storage format and ignores already existing "old" profiles, except for the default one. Data remains untouched, profiles created in the past are still here accessible by about:profile and if you don't want to use that new profile manager set browser.profiles.enabled entry to false.

From what I've seen around people using the popular customized Firefox variants, like Floorp, Librewolf were surprised by this and not fond of the change.

gdgghhhhh• 11 months ago

Also consider putting Firefox itself into a jail. E.g. using bubblewrap on Linux: https://gist.github.com/richardweinberger/cae9edeafeec4cdf65...

heresie-dabord• 11 months ago

firejail

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail

Dwedit3• 11 months ago

How would you know if DuckDuckGo actually respected privacy? It's a black box.

mixmastamyk5• 11 months ago

DDG reports all clicks to links.duckduckgo.com and improving.duckduckgo.com, etc. Which AdGuard seems to block, and maybe one of my browser settings/extensions as well.

Dwedit3• 11 months ago

Allegedly they do that for "referer protection" reasons to hide the search term that was used to get to the site.

rsync• 11 months ago

A fools errand.

No matter how effective this list is, the settings will either revert, change, or be silently undone.

New settings will alter the efficacy of the old ones.

Existing settings will disappear.

The behavior you hoped to configure changed to its opposite.

Remember: there was one morning when we all woke up and saw every dns query sent to cloudflare doh by default, and with no opt-in.

ekianjo• 11 months ago

saw every dns query sent to cloudflare doh by default, and with no opt-in

True. And most people don't even know it.

merek• 11 months ago

Will enabling "HTTPS-Only Mode" block http://localhost? If so, it would interfere with web development.

Refreeze5224• 11 months ago

No, you can always continue on to non-HTTPS pages.

sltkr• 11 months ago

No, it doesn't block localhost.

Also you can add exceptions, so if you have e.g. a HTTP-only server on your local network, you can whitelist it manually.

qingcharles• 11 months ago

Can you create some certs for yourself?

nilslindemann2• 11 months ago

Notice, if you have all these settings enabled, you can still be fingerprinted. Test here:

https://fingerprint.com/

In my tests only Tor was able to prevent that, but using Tor will give you bad rankings on payment sites like PayPal, you may even get banned there.

I learned this from here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35243355

That site is now black, surely a coincidence. Here the archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250801173508/https://www.bites...

Have a local copy.

4gotunameagain• 11 months ago

https://amiunique.org/ is scary.

LeoPanthera• 11 months ago

fingerprint dot com

Is this an ad? Of all the things I was expecting to see when I clicked that, "Contact Sales" was not one of them.

styanax3• 11 months ago

Use the EFF version, it's been around a long time: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

mzajc• 11 months ago

AFAIK none of these check for changing fingerprints. Your browser could report a very unique screen resolution, but could be configured to change it periodically. How much does that fool fingerprinting algorithms?

nilslindemann2• 11 months ago

I guess it would, but the problem of getting "bad karma" points on payment processors, etc. remains.

Further, this is not the only form of fingerprinting, there is also e.g. TLS fingerprinting [1].

Programmers should tell people that browsers and the internet are not private, and that everyone who claims otherwise does not tell the truth.

There should be more discussions between people more skilled than me, if and how such methods can be prevented. And that should be documented well. Including how to prevent getting blocked on sites.

A creative attempt would be when millions or billions of users have a software (self chosen!) which randomly visits sites, when the computer is not busy. This would not prevent fingerprinting, but the collected data would be useless (Someone in the other thread suggested that).

Another method would be to declare it illegal and require workers to report such methods to the authorities.

[1] https://roundproxies.com/blog/what-is-tls-fingerprint/

neandrake2• 11 months ago

Looks like the source to Bitestring's blog is still up, maybe domain registration just lapsed?

https://github.com/bitestring/bitestring.github.io/blob/main...

cookiengineer3• 11 months ago

This is kind of a stupid ChatGPT article.

No, this will not effectively help to reduce the fingerprint of your Browser.

A LOT more tracking services are integrated into the Firefox browser in various places (like New Tab page, Sync, Pocket, Shavar, Google Safebrowsing, OSCP, etc pp).

I wrote a more detailed article about this, and got an "as good as possible" as a result.

But yeah, please please start to use a Host Firewall where you can block on a per-domain and per-port and per-process basis (like LittleSnitch, OpenSnitch etc) to validate your assumptions. UIs will always lie to you, including the one from Firefox.

[1] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/firefox-privacy-guid...

mahoro• 11 months ago

Neat article.

I would add `layout.css.font-visibility=1` to hide all non-default fonts (makes a canvas font rendering test less useful).

binaryturtle• 11 months ago

Yes, sadly Little Snitch (or a similar app) is required to tame Firefox. It's a real shame since they use "Privacy" as selling point, but for me that starts with being transparent about what they do behind the users' backs with very clear ways to disable any nonsense (no about:config or policy BS, but proper GUI exposed options), or even better with a proper opt-in to those "security" and comfort features.

It pretty much eroded any trust I had in this browser and Mozilla (they are no more better than Google, Meta, Apple in that regard.) If it wasn't for uBlock Origin and availability for older OSX versions I would ditch it (the Dynasty build is the only option I have for a recent browser on my old Mac.)

gruez• 11 months ago

No, this will not effectively help to reduce the fingerprint of your Browser.

Ironically many of your fingerprinting tweaks in your article make your more fingerprintable, because disabling random web APIs makes you stick out like a sore thumb (think https://xkcd.com/1105/). Besides, most of the configs you're modifying for anti-fingerprinting purposes are already covered by RFP.

A LOT more tracking services are integrated into the Firefox browser in various places (like New Tab page, Sync, Pocket, Shavar, Google Safebrowsing, OSCP, etc pp).

Can you elaborate on how these services are "tracking"? Except for maybe safebrowsing, and OSCP, none of these services actually send information on what sites you visit. Unless you mean "tracking" to mean "make connections to the internet".

cookiengineer3• 11 months ago

The real question is on what OSI layer are you willing to die.

TCP fingerprinting is a real threat and most surveillance systems can identify your unique connection pretty easily, thanks to the quantum surveillance technique where closer surrounding and compromised hops will send you packets faster than the actual endpoint because they are geographically closer to you.

A real privacy aware browser caches everything, and scatters requests as much as possible through different network paths, and farbles Web APIs of the most common system and browser combination (which is Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome on Windows/Android).

I tried to implement all that, but I gave up working on that after I've been targeted in 2021. Maybe I have the time to get back to it after I am done with my current mission.

wackget• 11 months ago

My dream is a user-friendly network-level firewall of some kind which can selectively block requests to domains on the entire network level. Something like uMatrix but for your entire network.

Imagine being able to block `ads.google.com` or whatever from all of your devices at once but without having to rely on local DNS. Or being able to block `pornhub.com` from just some of your devices but not all of them.

I assume the technology to do this is readily available in the form of parental control software or enterprise/office firewalls. However on the consumer level I don't know of anything which does this effectively.

schiffern2• 11 months ago

Is this available as pastable text, ideally with the explanation parts as comment blocks?

Happy to see you recommend uBlock Origin and LocalCDN. I would humbly suggest ClearURLs might belong. Another excellent "set it and forget it" extension that skips common tracking redirects.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/clearurls/

https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

cookiengineer3• 11 months ago

Funny that you mention ClearURLs.

I was actually reading its codebase and wasn't happy with it due to potential sanitization problems with its regex usage and other things. So I kind of wrote it from scratch and it got to be something different.

But as always with my projects, nothing is ever really finished or usable.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/defiant

captainepoch• 11 months ago

If you want a hardened version of Firefox, download LibreWolf.

BaudouinVH3• 11 months ago

or Waterfox

procaryote• 11 months ago

Yeah, librewolf does a lot of the article's suggested things by default and is less likely to introduce new misfeatures to opt out from

positron26• 11 months ago

My entire feeling about privacy is that, while surveillance economy tends to amplify the worst parts, ultimately, Richard Thieme's presentation is right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atDgnkvzD8I

Thought experiment: in 100 years or even ten, can you imagine that there will not be tiny little camera robots that can get into the home of every person alive? Wouldn't every single living person be prone to having nude and unflattering, private moments leaked all over the internet?

Socially, if privacy is a construct, then so is the fallout we expect others and ourselves to feel when privacy is violated. To some extent, not all, this is self-inflicted Victorian thinking. To the extent that it's true, part of the answer is, in the words of the brave (lol) Michael Cohen, "So what?" Really, so what? I hope we can get to that kind of reaction to adults having their privacy upended because it just takes so much of the bite out of the problem, the shame that relatively innocent people would experience for something completely out of their control.

As far as the getting it back under control thing, we may also be coming to a point that more technologies are so dangerous or impactful that there becomes a need for more strict control so that powerful tech like miniaturization produces paper trails and the use of such technology comes with an implicit requirement for openness. I don't really care that people can use miniaturization, but I care if they can anonymize it to the extent that we create a lawless society with no remaining means of accountability.

What *will* Russia and North Korea do when it becomes plausible to unleash little robot assassins either in small numbers to target individuals or mass numbers to carry out what is essentially nuclear scale death without nuclear scale fallout and destruction? It is plausible that this is a new facet of WMDs and MAD-based deterrence.

Privacy, robots, and the inevitable slide into world war 3.

cxplay• 11 months ago

Firefox doesn't "help your privacy" and make promises just because it's developed by Mozilla, and Chromium doesn't become worse than Firefox just because it's developed by Google. As others have said, this article feels like it was written in LLM.

bmacho• 11 months ago

Basic things that browsers lack:

  - hooks between network steps
  - hooks between steps while rendering/interacting with a website

Things that I want to do but I can't:

  - catch a request and modify it, e.g. when a webpage tells my browser to visit ajax.googleapis.com/jquery.js then my browser SHOULD NOT DO IT. Seriously, just don't start running shit on my computer when I click something. Noone wants that, apart from Google. Not the users. I should be able to modify that request, and serve jquery from somewhere else. 
  - stop the browser's javascript execution
  - run my own javascript (these two are currently unavailable together, if you don't allow javascript on a webpage, then you can't run your own) (or modify HTML/DOM in some other language)

I don't think Firefox is worth supporting, I believe it is a Trojan Horse of Google (or at least a Useful Idiot), and its existence is the main reason we have exactly 0 browsers (open source or proprietary) right now. It should die, so something else might flourish.

BaudouinVH3• 11 months ago

Privacy Possum is better than Privacy Badger imho

barnabee• 11 months ago

It appears not to have been updated since 2019?

See https://github.com/cowlicks/privacypossum

BaudouinVH3• 11 months ago

Oups - I had no idea. Thanks for noticing this. I'm back to the badger. :)

Pooge• 11 months ago

Good luck remembering to do that every time Firefox updates. Hopefully, that's the only time it changes settings, right? Right...?

Go for a Firefox fork and jump ship to Ladybird once it comes out. Forks wouldn't exist if it was trivial to revert Mozilla's mistakes.

ris2• 11 months ago

The paradox being that every thing you customize about your browser config becomes another thing that can potentially be fingerprinted and makes you stand out as one of the 1% who has ever looked in about:config.

styanax3• 11 months ago

That's a common thought, but it depends what you touch. I have hundreds of user.js customizations related to local browser behaviour (e.g. null out a lot of upstream URLs, I caught FF making DNS queries to services I disabled) - https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ reports I have extremely strong anti-fingerprinting. The "failures" are not related to Firefox.

Reading the details of the results, my unique values as reported come from factors which are hard to address; I have an Arch Linux user-agent (small population) and I have Linux fonts installed (we'll fail the span-font test easily compared to Windows or macOS) are the two huge outliers. These two are my heavily identified traits, the rest are a wash or normality ("1 in 3").

The fonts one is funny - the span-font metric for my system is 16.82 of 115876.67 kinda showing just how using Fonts you can pick a Linux user out of the results with ease. I have "the usual" font packages installed, nothing too fancy just enough to see CJK / UTF-8 around the web like everyone else. (for completeness I do remap 2 or 3 esoteric fdnts on my side due to a site using them).

Side note: I have webgl disabled in user.js; the site reports I'm 1 of 85 statistically, this being the third largest and only outlier in normality.

integralid2• 11 months ago

factors which are hard to address; I have an Arch Linux user-agent

Is this hard to address? Sounds like a easy thing to fix.

These two are my heavily identified traits, the rest are a wash or normality ("1 in 3").

With enough 1-in-3s you can still be unique, sadly. Your fingerprint is AND of every indicator.

patrakov• 11 months ago

Important: this is a checklist for privacy, not for general security.

clircle• 11 months ago

I just install librewolf.

Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy

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