Browser fingerprint protection

[Antonius32]

@Supernova: Thank you for explaining!

[LambdaFox]

... Looking at the impact of removing enumeration (and potential breakage of a lot of websites), I don't want to do this until I'm sure it won't somehow break website plugin detection for a large group of Pale Moon users. Privacy protection is important, but it should not break people's browsing...

Would it not be feasible to only make this possible with about:config? My personal preference would be to see which, if any, of the sites I visit break if you do that. I do understand, though that would not be "most users" choice.

I am currently using PM 24.6.2 which has the randomization built in. Disabling plugin enumeration altogether is the only feature I am missing on my bucket list; so, I have not moved up to 25.x.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

... Looking at the impact of removing enumeration (and potential breakage of a lot of websites), I don't want to do this until I'm sure it won't somehow break website plugin detection for a large group of Pale Moon users. Privacy protection is important, but it should not break people's browsing...

Would it not be feasible to only make this possible with about:config? My personal preference would be to see which, if any, of the sites I visit break if you do that. I do understand, though that would not be "most users" choice.

I am currently using PM 24.6.2 which has the randomization built in. Disabling plugin enumeration altogether is the only feature I am missing on my bucket list; so, I have not moved up to 25.x.

Why would this prevent you from using the latest release? 24.6.2 isn't even the last in the 24.x line.. I don't understand.

[Supernova]

I don't understand either.

[LambdaFox]

...I am currently using PM 24.6.2 which has the randomization built in. Disabling plugin enumeration altogether is the only feature I am missing on my bucket list; so, I have not moved up to 25.x.

Why would this prevent you from using the latest release? 24.6.2 isn't even the last in the 24.x line.. I don't understand.

I don't think I said it "prevented" me from upgrading. I still use really old versions of Firefox, because I hate the new interface. That is what got me curious in Pale Moon to begin with.

There is nothing in the feature set above 24.6.2 that motivates me to upgrade. Being able to disable plugin enumeration would.

[Moonchild]

The security updates alone should motivate you to upgrade - but in the end that's your choice.
Keep in mind though that for general tech support, older versions are in principle not supported by the community.

As far as fingerprinting goes: the sort order of plugins is shuffled, so any tracking site that uses this entropy source will not get useful data from any Pale Moon user.
Please see my earlier posts in this very thread.

Keep in mind that quite a few sites with custom (e.g. authentication) plugins will use enumeration to determine whether a plugin is installed. Those sites will fail to detect the plugins properly if enumeration is disabled. There's a good reason that a number of plugins are whitelisted (Java, Quicktime, Shockwave) at Mozilla with this removal of enumeration because otherwise other sites would break on a grander scale. That is giving priority treatment to those plugins, and no easy way for users to add others (apart from knowing the exact internal plugin name and adding it manually to a pref). It is not treating plugins in a neutral way.

Also, there is no reason to implement this now in Pale Moon, because the fingerprinting sites, with mainstream browsers no longer giving this information, will have moved on to the next fingerprinting effort, instead. Instead I'd rather that Pale Moon keeps poisoning their databases if they still use plugin enumeration to track