average chrome fork: we added a gaming mode and integration with bnpl
average firefox fork: we found the option in about:config that breaks 100% of sites and turned it on!

so the thing with the tor browser racconfig is that it is designed to be used in racconjunction with tor browser and tor racconnections. the threat model of it is "people potentially die if deanonymization occurs" which is probably not what happens with most users and also the big thing that makes it hard to do is the use of tor. a website being able to tell that you live near [city] from ip geolocation is likely far more interesting than you having a 1080p screen. or the fact that your local ip address is 192.168.2.123 just at most points towards you using the default racconfig of some brands of home routers with default dhcp racconfiguration

it's not *meant* to be a general racconfig for 99% of users because it breaks so much tiny things that could assist in deanonymization. your posts probably do a better job at deanonymizing you than raccanvas or webgpu support could.

@charlotte I'm a web dev, rely on dev tools, sometimes ones that got added yesterday, so I stick to upstream browsers like chromium and firefox instead of any forks.

@charlotte I mean to some extent the whole fingerprinting thing helps trackers identify a user/device/browser profile uniquely without tracking cookies but I don't think it's possible to effectively combat that anyway, especially not without breaking everything

@tofu @charlotte the point here is that browser forks are snake oil at best and harmful at worst, they don't actually have anything to offer

@novenary
a lot of the anti fingerprinting measures just kinda substitute a fixed set of values, one without variance you would typically find in real data, even on the same system

that in itself is also thing you can fingerprint. only a small subset of people have this set of properties that come from anti fingerprinting measures

@novenary @charlotte chromium forks have working ad blockers, but that's a problem google created by themselves

@tofu @charlotte I mean ubo lite works but yes that's a thing, not sure how much effort it is to maintain downstream tho because google will definitely end up breaking it

@novenary @charlotte @tofu except @torproject / #TorBrowser because noone should manually setup #Tor if they only want to browse because we allowed #JavaScript aka. Turing-Complete #RCE-#Malware in Browsers to exist!

@charlotte @novenary that's why the options are enabled by default in tor. Every tor user looks the sams. If only one tor user activates anti-fingerprinting, they are uniquely identified.

@charlotte there is no way for you to turn it off without editing the registry!

@charlotte@akko.chir.rs
Nowadays not only forks that come with more sane defaults, but even those that explicitly remove features, might become successful — because no one asked for these features in the first place 😂
Anti-features always existed, but now they are becoming too common and getting rid of them is still a useful activity I suppose 🤷

@charlotte and somehow the chrome browser works in less places

@tofu @charlotte
the best web development is where you have server-only computation and no client-side scripts. Not many tools are needed in that case

@ki @tofu web dev tools are still a live saver even on sites that are exclusively html and css

@charlotte @tofu
sure, but they don't need to be bleeding edge all the time :D