am I crazy for thinking I could clock whether something was rendered in chromium

“I’ll never pass for a firefox render…”

@julia canvas fingerprinting tools / tracking pixels be like: “we can always tell”

@sodiboo @julia canvas fingerprinting, tracking pixels and “that one oomf”

@julia my friend has this talent only because somehow firefox rendering makes her screen tearing awful which gives her insane headaches

-carrie

@julia@eepy.moe A/B/X double blind test ​​

@pancakes not even just that, font rendering is sufficiently different that I think I could spot the difference

@sodiboo canvas fingerprinting tools don't distinguish between browsers though. they just create opaque hashes
@julia

@thermia @sodiboo @julia tip: use uBo (duh), NoScript and alternate frontends

@a_blahaj @julia @sodiboo @thermia for reference, if fingerprinting is the concern, Firefox in the Strict tracking protection mode subtly randomizes canvas readouts without any extensions

there is also resistFingerprinting and addons like CanvasBlocker

@risc @julia @sodiboo @thermia oh, right
do not forget to set privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config !

@a_blahaj recommending RFP is a brave endeavour
RFP changes/breaks roughly everything in the browser lol

it's also not strictly necessary. RFP is part of Tor Uplift, and was intended for Tor Browser. it's most likely excessive for normal usage
@julia @sodiboo @thermia

@risc @julia @sodiboo @thermia Wdym “it breaks roughly everything”? I’ve been keeping it on for forever and it works perfectly fine.

@a_blahaj forced light theme, canvas readout fuckery

"roughly everything" was an overexaggeration yeah
@julia @sodiboo @thermia

@risc @julia @sodiboo @thermia the light theme, i can deal with dark reader
the canvas redout fuckery, i don’t care. get fucked, you’re a useless piece of “necessary” bloatware.

@a_blahaj canvas being "useless" is certainly a take 🥴

@julia @sodiboo @thermia

@a_blahaj @sodiboo @thermia @risc me when I can’t do anything that manipulates images off screen because it’s “bloat”

@julia omw to use Skia in WebAssembly instead /j
@a_blahaj

@risc @sodiboo @thermia @a_blahaj average NoScript user take

@risc @julia @sodiboo @thermia even though it might be useful, it’s used for more evil things than good

@a_blahaj there are working ways to mitigate the risks without lobotomizing the API lol. which, again, FF does by default already, and Chromium has in the works afaik

RFP is fine, and like, anyone can use whatever they want. but this one doesn't particularly like recommendations of overkill (or even excessive) privacy/security solutions that don't consider the full spectrum of what the solution does, what its side-effects are, how and when it's actually useful, etc

@julia @sodiboo @thermia

@sodiboo @julia @thermia @risc it’s the closest i can get to having dark theme and RFP. might as well look at the alternatives

@sodiboo dark reader is extremely fingerprintable, if someone actually cares to fingerprint it to begin with. individual settings, differences in behavior between extension versions, etc

nobody seriously fingerprints the light/dark theme. the setting is very much mutable for normal users. RFP was made for a single specific purpose: separating Tor Browser users into as few buckets as possible.

@julia @thermia @a_blahaj

@risc @sodiboo @julia @thermia fine. what do i use instead then?

@a_blahaj this one's solution was to not use RFP. it used to use CanvasBlocker, but stopped doing even that once fingerprintingProtection became default

currently it uses Helium (Chromium->ungoogled-chromium->Helium). here it just uses the built-in fingerprint poisoning functionality and disables JS by default (which, however, is unrelated to fingerprinting - it just got too annoyed).

@sodiboo

@sodiboo @julia @thermia @risc @a_blahaj it could implement it by setting a dark theme which is harder-impossible to read for some users

@sodiboo matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)").matches

JS can access the color-scheme.

@sodiboo @a_blahaj @julia @risc @thermia like it’s not a general purpose option, it’s for tor where the failure of getting the user deanonymized could get them arrested or worse

@sodiboo @julia @thermia @risc @a_blahaj conceptually, javascript can always* access any information exposed to CSS. even if there's no analogous API to read media query states in a single line, JS is able to manipulate and examine the DOM. Inject some CSS that changes the style of some element based on a media query and then check what it looks like with getComputedStyle

* the exception is link :visited state, which has specific carve-outs in this function where browsers will intentionally return false information. doing the same for arbitrary media queries seems kind of intractable though, and regardless there are certainly legitimate use cases for scripts to know the user's color scheme so this will almost certainly never be changed except in the "user is not allowed to use dark mode" way that you observe

@sodiboo as said by erin, :visited is treated specially
and again, RFP was made for Tor Browser. the fact that it's used by anyone else was never intended

@risc @sodiboo then why is that config option merged from the tor browser to firefox main?

@sodiboo because it isn't as critical as :visited, is used for legitimate stuff (for example: how would you theme a WebGL/WebGPU-based game's interface with CSS?), and is generally benign from a privacy standpoint (again, it's a single bit of very mutable info, and thus has almost zero value).

@sodiboo this one thinks that Tor just does not care enough. forcing it is easier and probably doesn't matter for the kind of users they are targeting

@sodiboo TB has three security levels. "standard" (literally almost every browser feature on), "safer" (webgl is click-to-play, wasm is off), "safest" (js is off)

the default is "standard". do not ask about the logic lmfao. TB has some questionable (from its POV) decisions