960875 - Optionally limit possible browser size to increments of some number

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Yuri]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Many browser users are concerned about the browser device fingerprint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint They believe that such fingerprint allows certain parties to track them.

I suggest to allow user to limit possible browser sizes to be multiples of some reasonable integer, for example 32.
So that the browser size, as reported to the webservers like this one http://whatsmy.browsersize.com , will have fewer possible values, therefore reducing trackability by browser parameters.

So the option will look like this: X Limit possible browser window sizes __ Size increment

If the screen size is 1600X1200, increment of 32 would reduce the number of unique sizes from ~1.9 millions to ~1.8 thousands, which is 1000 times reduction.

There is really no benefit in allowing the browser to have sizes with the pixel precision.

Comment 1

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1472046

Move all DOM bugs that haven’t been updated in more than 3 years and has no one currently assigned to P5.

If you have questions, please contact :mdaly.

Comment 2

[Simon Mainey]

Just cleaning up old open privacy issues ... Tom, close this as WONTFIX? We already have letterboxing, it's just not front facing which does exactly what OP wanted

Comment 3

[Tom Ritter [:tjr]]

I think it's DOM's decision whether or not to wontfix this as a potential improvement to anti-tracking.