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Gourd

@mcc @brandon You can turn off most of LibreWolf's more extreme features in its preferences (all the anti-fingerprinting stuff), though, which'd just leave you with "Firefox minus the Mozilla cruft".

16 comments
mcc

@gourd @brandon Can you turn on timezone reporting like other browsers have? A friend of mine who tried librewolf mentioned that Librewolf removed timezone reporting for fingerprinting reasons and they couldn't find a preference for it. Timezone reporting is important as many websites are unusable without it.

Dr. Brandon Wiley

@mcc @gourd Oh interesting, what is the critical use of timezone reporting? Like for calendars?

mcc

@brandon @gourd For example, here is the schedule page for "Games Done Quick", a biyearly event I am a fan of.

gamesdonequick.com/schedule/48

You'll notice the times are automatically shown in your local time zone. Because the page assumes this timezone feature will work, it doesn't *say* what timezone the times are listed relative to. Without timezone reporting, the page would probably default to GMT or something and be poorly usable.

mcc

@brandon @gourd This becomes more problematic if you consider a page which rather than being for entertainment is something where the time is critical, for example an airplane booking site.

Gourd

@mcc @brandon Or absolutely hilarious cases like Best Buy refusing to let you place pickup orders if the store is closed based on your local browser time instead of checking on their end.

Gourd replied to mcc

@mcc @brandon I have been so tempted to use this to place an order for pickup for during when the store is closed and see what happens, but I don't want to mess with random store employees.

Gourd

@brandon @mcc Timestamps on social media posts, for one.

Half the reason I moved to a Mastodon Glitch Edition server was it lets you manually set time zone so I could have sensical Mastodon timestamps and ResistFingerprinting on.

Gourd

@mcc @brandon Going into Edit -> Settings -> LibreWolf and unchecking "Enable Resist Fingerprinting" causes timezone reporting to start working again.

mcc

@gourd @brandon Cool! I guess my friend's specific complaint was they wanted the fingerprinting protection *other* than that single measure.

Gourd

@mcc @brandon Their logic is that they want it to be an all-or-nothing toggle so that there isn't people can't have a more obvious signature by it only being partially spoofed, I think? *shrug*

mcc

@gourd @brandon Uhhh wait. Now that you mention it that actually *is* a really strong fingerprinting signal lol

Gourd

@mcc @brandon At the least, I'd check the LibreWolf config page and think about "Silently block canvas access requests" and "Enable letterboxing" which are under the ResistFingerprinting one and one of them might be turned on by default? (Don't entirely remember.)

The first (block canvas access) suppresses warnings that a site is requesting to access your canvas and those are useful to know if something might break (it usually won't, but you can hit a button to dismiss it permanently for that site). The second locks LibreWolf to only display at common resolutions no matter what your window size is and put padding around it for the rest of the window. That one's too much for even me.

@mcc @brandon At the least, I'd check the LibreWolf config page and think about "Silently block canvas access requests" and "Enable letterboxing" which are under the ResistFingerprinting one and one of them might be turned on by default? (Don't entirely remember.)

The first (block canvas access) suppresses warnings that a site is requesting to access your canvas and those are useful to know if something might break (it usually won't, but you can hit a button to dismiss it permanently for that site)....

Jessica's new Main

@mcc@mastodon.social @gourd@indiepocalypse.social @brandon@mastodon.blanu.net If you want some protections, you can install the "canvas blocker" extension. I believe at some point they recommended you at least install canvas blocker if you couldn't use rFP
for me I really want access to dark mode and rfp disables that.
as for android, you can install fennec fdroid which is basically firefox with telemetry disabled by default. Mull is more of the "aggressive privacy" angle if you're into that.

yuki - queen of the snow
@mcc @gourd @brandon also, is there a way for it to send the prefered language to websites? i can live with most things being in english, but when dealing with government websites, i'd rather have them default to my native language. also, this is the kinda stuff that makes it much harder for me to send screenshots of stuff to friends, or even let them do something for a bit on my pc
Dr. Brandon Wiley

@gourd @mcc Thanks for the recommendation! I'll try out LibreWolf. I also use TorBrowser sometimes, which is Firefox-derived. I'm sure they'll turn off all the new ad stuff, their very good about that sort of thing.

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