Firefox gets some new fingerprint protections

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Mozilla is strengthening Firefox's fingerprint protections. Mozilla says that its research showed the improvements halved the percentage of users detected as unique.

For those unaware, a digital fingerprint is like a trail of breadcrumbs that websites use to identify you uniquely. This could be anything from your operating system and its settings, your browser's settings, time zone, etc. Mozilla warns that fingerprinting may happen when cookies are blocked, or even in private browsing, and they could continue tracking users for months.


(Image courtesy: Mozilla)

Firefox already has some built-in features such as Enhanced Tracking Protection (introduced in 2020), and Total Cookie Protection (debuted in 2021), which prevent websites/trackers from stalking users around the web for displaying ads, or for nefarious purposes. Here's how many trackers Firefox blocked on my computer in about 4 months. 

While Firefox already blocks social media trackers, cross-site tracking cookies, known fingerprinters, cryptominers, etc., Mozilla explains that online trackers often target various information, from the font that is used to render a web page, to scripts that request hardware details such as the number of cores a CPU has, the multitouch capability of a display, and even the dimensions of the dock or taskbar.

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