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0 pointsnordsieck3y ago0 comments

> I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do.

IMO, it should be enough if incognito mode presents an identical fingerprint on everyone's browser.

0 comments

grishka3y ago

It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. Sure, you could remove all those PWA and pretend-OS APIs and hardly anyone would notice, but what about things like viewport size and font rendering? You can't exactly hide them from a website.

matheusmoreira3y ago

> what about things like viewport size and font rendering? You can't exactly hide them from a website.

Of course you can. Viewport? Just return fake viewport data containing the most statistically common display properties. Website renders incorrectly? They only have themselves to blame, shouldn't have abused that data for hostile purposes. Data is a privilege, we can and should take it away. Fonts? Just force everything to use Noto Sans or Noto Mono. Everything will render correctly. Maybe the designer's vision won't be fully realized but that's not a problem.

nordsieckOP3y ago

> It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience.

And that's exactly what I'm talking about.

> what about things like viewport size and font rendering?

Not much can be done about viewport size, but a browser could easily ship with 2 fonts (one serif and one sans serif) and only allow access to those.

derefr3y ago

“Font rendering” is a different thing than “what fonts you have.” Font rendering is about how fonts are drawn to the screen. The trick is to draw some words to a <canvas> and then pixel-peep the result. Different OSes and browsers use different font renderers and font hinting logic; fonts will even render differently on a different-DPI screen.

3 more replies

IX-1033y ago

For viewport, you can limit the size presented to the page to a few sizes with different aspect ratios. Browsers can simply rescale the page to the actual window size for display on the screen. That also works for font rendering.

If users decide they want pixel-perfect display, they can either resize the window to one of the allowed sizes or disable this feature for a specific page.

account423y ago

You are describing the "compromising the user experience" alternative.

GoblinSlayer3y ago

User and javascript can simply see different things, like adnauseam does. User experience is already shit.

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