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ProTip: If you enabled resistFingerprinting, you have to manually allow HTML5 canvas usage per website (mastodon.social)

submitted 8 months ago by heavyboots@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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My apologies to the Bugzilla team for wasting their time holding my hand on this one. Would have honestly never noticed the little "HTML5" info icon to the left of the URL bar though without their help.

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[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 46 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Surely this is a user experience that could be improved, no? Awesome feature but confusing solution.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The resist fingerprinting mode scrambles canvas read out to prevent sites from using it to create a fingerprint. Because of that, any site that needs to read the canvas back for legitimate purposes will also receive scrambled data. You get more privacy for the minor inconvenience of having to manually allow canvas usage for the sites that actually need it.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 16 points 8 months ago

Yes I’m aware, but the user interface doesn’t make it easy to understand A) why the canvas looks scrambled, and B) how to permit it on a per-site basis.

The technical implementation is fine, it’s just the user workflow that needs fixed.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 months ago

And very few sites actually need it.

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not really, because doing this will make you more fingerprintable (see my other comment). That's why the default settings are striking a balance between making all users look similar and not breaking too many things (that would cause users to use user-specific overrides that make them more unique), and why resistFingerprinting is in about:config rather than a user-facing setting or enabled by default.

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago

Or use something like Chameleon and mess with about:config which makes every unique fingerprint, different as your data is scrambled. Firefox still has webRTC leakage, font fingerprinting, audio fingerprinting... That's the reason why people use arkenfox's user.js !

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

On librewolf I just get a popup asking to allow canvas

[–] sep@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A popup sounds like an annoyance you must deal with on every webpage. Not just the ones that use the canvas for useful things

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Canvas is rarely on a web page or at least it rarely affects me