Not sure if anyone has used this before, but I have enjoyed using ffprofile. Easy to generate the config you want to enable/disable specific features, and many great options are enabled by default. The code is on GitHub running AGPL, which is important to me. If there are issues with it, the maintainer still appears to be active.
I tried searching here for discussion of it, and seems no one has mentioned it as a topic, so thought I’d start one on it.
Be careful with making custom firefox profiles, as it can make you easier to fingerprint by having a much more unique browser signature. If you are looking for a custom firefox profile, use Arkenfox (GitHub - arkenfox/user.js: Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking: a comprehensive user.js template for configuration and hardening). It’s a community project to create a hardened firefox profile and you can customize it using a user-overrides.js file in the profile. Thereby you can still get any updates from the Arkenfox community while maintaining your customizations. Be sure to read the wiki.
By default Arkenfox’s user.js file will give your Firefox a similar profile as LibreWolf does, but with more customization and still using the Firefox browser instead of using another browser based on Firefox.
If you want things compartmentalized, you can also use multiple profiles and modify the user-overrides.js accordingly. For example, if you need WebGL for one purpose, then you can create another profile based on the Arkenfox user.js and have the two profiles separated.
You can go to about:profiles in firefox to edit your profiles.
Ahhhh, I suppose I didn’t consider as much possible privacy tradeoff for some of the simplicity/security it may provide - thanks for the new recommendation!
You can use tools like https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and https://fingerprint.com/ to test your browser and get estimate on how unique it is.
Also, just a side note, beware of the Brave browser, especially its “Tor” functionality. I tested Brave before by using fingerprint.com. I first went to the site normally with Brave and then used the Tor incognito function of Brave to visit the site. fingerprint.com identified it as the same identity.
Edit: Using Arkenfox and Librewolf with the same IP also returned the same identity on fingerprint.com. Changing the IP address, for example by using a Socks5 proxy, changes the identity returned on fingerprint.com
Get used to using the Tor browser for day-to-day browsing.
Generally good advice, but Tor is freaking slow.
To be fair, if anti-fingerprinting is a priority, Tor Browser or Mullvad Browser are the best options. Maybe Brave is useful for basic fingerprinting protection.
For most other Browsers and custom browser configurations, defeating advanced (or even basic) fingerprinting, is not trivial and is partially out of scope at this point in time. (I use Arkenfox, and Covermytracks tells me I have a unique browser fingerprint, my recollection is that this was the case even with a fresh Arkenfox profile and no user-overrides.
So while I don’t ignore anti-fingerprinting, I do prioritize other things higher than anti-fingerprinting with FF+AF, because the difference between extremely unique, and unique may not matter if you are unique in either case.
edit: just retested now, with (1) my personal Arkenfox profile, and (2) an unmodified arkenfox profile (no overrides), CoverMyTracks shows both as being unique (in the latter case the only extension I’ve installed is uBlock Origin in its default configuration).