Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy

(andrewmarder.net)

266 points amarder | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 11:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.402s | source

Show context

cookiengineer ◴[31 Aug 25 04:49 UTC] No.45080461[source]▶

This is kind of a stupid ChatGPT article.

No, this will not effectively help to reduce the fingerprint of your Browser.

A LOT more tracking services are integrated into the Firefox browser in various places (like New Tab page, Sync, Pocket, Shavar, Google Safebrowsing, OSCP, etc pp).

I wrote a more detailed article about this, and got an "as good as possible" as a result.

But yeah, please please start to use a Host Firewall where you can block on a per-domain and per-port and per-process basis (like LittleSnitch, OpenSnitch etc) to validate your assumptions. UIs will always lie to you, including the one from Firefox.

[1] https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/firefox-privacy-guid...

replies(7): >>45082458 #>>45082927 #>>45083160 #>>45083737 #>>45084270 #>>45085747 #>>45100657 #

1. schiffern ◴[31 Aug 25 18:39 UTC] No.45085747[source]▶

>>45080461 #

Is this available as pastable text, ideally with the explanation parts as comment blocks?

Happy to see you recommend uBlock Origin and LocalCDN. I would humbly suggest ClearURLs might belong. Another excellent "set it and forget it" extension that skips common tracking redirects.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/clearurls/

https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

replies(1): >>45086944 #

2. cookiengineer ◴[31 Aug 25 20:48 UTC] No.45086944[source]▶

>>45085747 (TP) #

Funny that you mention ClearURLs.

I was actually reading its codebase and wasn't happy with it due to potential sanitization problems with its regex usage and other things. So I kind of wrote it from scratch and it got to be something different.

But as always with my projects, nothing is ever really finished or usable.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/defiant

↑