Forgot to reply in the previous post lol…
I’m curious what makes you feel this way, considering it seems you have a strong interest in preventing fingerprinting and Mullvad Browser is one of only two browsers that excel in this area?
It really just doesn’t fit into my threat model, and absent a specific need for it, it would sacrifice too much for me to use it. I am interested in generally avoiding advertising companies building a profile of me to follow me around through the internet, but I don’t personally require it to be foolproof. Defeating most naive scripts is enough. Now obviously, I would never say no to more protection if it came with minimal sacrifice. But Mullvad browser falls a bit over the balance for me.
While I do sanitize my browsers on close so I don’t care about history or shared tabs or the like, I do like having my bookmarks and browser/extension settings sync between desktop and mobile via my Mozilla account. Also, while I follow the wisdom of “less is more” with extensions and have very few (and even disable them when not in use), I do have a couple extensions I like to use (most importantly keepassXC’s browser extension) and as I understand it, putting additional extensions on Mullvad-if even possible-is a big no-no.
I also don’t use Mullvad VPN, and don’t see myself switching from Proton VPN. Granted, I think that is less of an issue now than it was when Mullvad Browser first came out, but it’s at least something.
With that said, if I ever do desire more privacy for any particular purpose, but for which true anonymity isn’t required, I’ll usually spin it up. That’s a pretty limited case for me though, so I don’t end up doing it very often.
That is great news! (and pretty surprising to me) I didn’t expect desktop Firefox (Arkenfox + uBO) to be able to pass that test, I especially didn’t expect that Firefox on Android would pass.
Indeed, and in my case, it is actually without Arkenfox as well, although I do use temporary containers. That addon makes every tab open in its own container, and sure enough, even if I open up two tabs of fingerprint.com side by side, it will think each tab is unique and generate a different ID.
Without temporary containers, it will still generate a different ID if I close the browser, but not within the same browser session.
For Android, it also requires closing and re-opening the browser, but doing so will indeed defeat it.
While I know you are familiar with the test, I should also point out in case other readers are not that this behavior isn’t a given; on Brave with standard fingerprint blocking, despite fully sanitizing browser data on close and wiping all local storage (similar to how Firefox containers have different local storage per container), it is still able to re-identify me with the same ID. With that said, at least on desktop Brave, I have found that if I wait long enough before re opening the browser, it will sometimes change. But on a browser with no protection, like Google Chrome? That ID ain’t changing, regardless of whether you wipe all data, change your IP address, go incognito, or all of the above.