Canvas fingerprinting - differences between Firefox?

[Testertime]

Hey everyone

I have a question regarding canvas fingerprinting. Sometimes I'm doing a test at panopticlick.eff.org to look how unique the fingerprinting is. With Firefox 31 it was a 5 digit number, and I'm usually using addons like Disconnect, BetterPrivacy and Noscript. Without Noscript the result is an unique fingerprint.
Between the complains how horrible Mozillas decisions have become nowadays, I have heard of this nice project and I like it so far! And I'm really surprised when I did the canvas fingerprinting test with this browser. The site says "Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 742,766 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours." Even more strange, when I had changed the value general.useragent.locale to "de" for German, the site says 2 million!

My question is: What's the trick? Is that because Pale Moon is based on the Firefox 24 ESR, or some changed internal settings for better privacy? I'm really curious.

Thanks in advance!

And a little off-topic question: Is there a way to change the backward-forward buttons? I would like to have them the same size. I would like to customize a few things with the interface like I was able to do with Classic Theme Restorer.

[dark_moon]

Palemoon use privacy settings, which firefox didn't have, yes.

For icons: you can for example use small icons in settings.

[Moonchild]

Keep in mind that Pale Moon is a non-mainstream browser and as such will be more easily uniquely identifiable. Also, With the plugin order randomization, your entropy is increased on purpose. For an explanation of why this is good, see the relevant thread on this forum.

Fingerprinting will always be possible. Today it's canvas fingerprinting, tomorrow it's something else. People will be able to uniquely identify you most of the time when you are on the public web - that's not necessarily a disaster in itself, either.

[Testertime]

Thanks for your answers!

Palemoon use privacy settings, which firefox didn't have, yes.

Yes, but I'm curious what exactly, if there are some better about:config settings or a whole lot more under the hood changes.

For icons: you can for example use small icons in settings.

I saw this, but I think that's too small. But honestly, I have adapted myself to the classic design (again) and compared to the newer ones it just looks beautiful with these colors.

Keep in mind that Pale Moon is a non-mainstream browser and as such will be more easily uniquely identifiable. Also, With the plugin order randomization, your entropy is increased on purpose. For an explanation of why this is good, see the relevant thread on this forum.

Great to hear that you did such changes, thanks! I guess it can't be the source of the high Panopticlick result, and strangely it's suddenly not as high as before, every new page visit decreases the number (no matter if cache is cleared or cache-less mode aka private mode).

Fingerprinting will always be possible. Today it's canvas fingerprinting, tomorrow it's something else. People will be able to uniquely identify you most of the time when you are on the public web - that's not necessarily a disaster in itself, either.

Thanks for linking this too. I'm aware that I'm far away from an anonymous identity, but I don't feel comfortable if there are (for me unknown) unused options to prevent a few things. For example I wouldn't like to visit webpages without addons like Disconnect again, because of it's bizarre amount of unnecessary data due to many trackers and often ads (the poor CPU...). And it's a shame that Mozilla claims to care about privacy, while they don't really care... Currently I'm using your browser as my main browser and I'm really happy, Firefox 31 has often some insane CPU usage while typing or page loading which isn't present here. I like the better title bar in windowed mode too. But the slow memory leaks are the same, and I guess it's not easy to change that.

[dark_moon]

Yes, but I'm curious what exactly, if there are some better about:config settings or a whole lot more under the hood changes.

Under the hood changes and more about:config settings for palemoon intern finetuning, like the referer control.

Icons: Then maybe look for a theme or change the icons with css code.

Fingerprinting will always be possible. Today it's canvas fingerprinting

CanvasBlocker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... vasblocker

For example I wouldn't like to visit webpages without addons like Disconnect again

You can save even more memory and cpu if you have NoScript and RequestPolicy. Stop all ads and tracker

[Supernova]

Great to hear that you did such changes, thanks! I guess it can't be the source of the high Panopticlick result, and strangely it's suddenly not as high as before, every new page visit decreases the number (no matter if cache is cleared or cache-less mode aka private mode).

If you delete cookies, and go there again and again ; you'll be "less unique" only because it has seen you several times.

[Testertime]

CanvasBlocker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... vasblocker

You can save even more memory and cpu if you have NoScript and RequestPolicy. Stop all ads and tracker

Thanks for the link! And I'm currently using Noscript. I'm going to try out Request Policy, I need to see if there are many differences or benefits between the addon Disconnect.

If you delete cookies, and go there again and again ; you'll be "less unique" only because it has seen you several times.

If it's able to see me again even after complete resets and IP changes then it sounds paradox for me why it doesn't show me an unique value instantly instead of everytime a less unique number. I guess the topic is a lot more complex than I thought...