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Firefox 52 Borrows One More Privacy Feature From the Tor Browser (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla engineers have added a mechanism to Firefox 52 that prevents websites from fingerprinting users using system fonts. The user privacy protection system was borrowed from the Tor Browser, where a similar mechanism blocks websites from identifying users based on the fonts installed on their computers, only returning a list of "default fonts" per each OS. While sabotaging system font queries won't stop user fingerprinting as a whole, this is just one of the latest privacy-related updates Mozilla has added to Firefox, taken from Tor. Back in July 2016, Mozilla engineers started the Tor Uplift project, which aims to improve Firefox's privacy features with the ones present in the Tor Browser.
If they really want to help prevent fingerprinting, they would change the user agent to "Firefox." There is no reason for websites to know anything, let alone everything, the detailed user agent provides. Yeah, I know the argument of "but then there is no way to tell if they want/need mobile." Yeah, that is false, if they want mobile, the user will request mobile; plus detection scripts are notoriously inaccurate as I get served mobile pages on Chromebooks (try nfl.com with a Windows UA vs a Chromebook one, for example), on desktop versions of lessor used browsers and, in many instances, on my Linux machines.
I'm sure some Firefox supporters will post a bunch of unrealistic benchmarks showing how Firefox can run some convoluted JavaScript benchmark the fastest.
No I wouldn't bother with that. I don't think benchmarks mean much. What I can say is that anecdotally I use all the major browsers routinely and whatever speed difference they have are too insignificant for me to care about. I use Firefox the most because it's the one that annoys me the least but we're talking marginal differences. Safari and Edge aren't available cross platform so they aren't contenders to me though I do use them a fair bit for various reasons. Chrome is fine too - my preference is more based on my work flow and configuration preferences than anything else.
On every computer I've tried, from Windows to OS X to Linux, Firefox feels so much slower than Chrome.
I would disagree with that based on my own usage. I use both routinely and in both cases the constraint on speed is almost always the speed of my internet connection or the speed of the database servicing the information from the other end of the line.
I wouldn't say that Chrome is as much of a winner here, but it isn't unusual for me to look at top or some other process manager and seeing Firefox with many gigabytes of resident memory.
I wouldn't say Chrome is any better at all. Not to any meaningful degree. I'm not criticizing Chrome but I think the problem is just that there is a lot of data to display and keeping a compact memory footprint while maintaining performance is actually a rather challenging problem.
Make Firefox a browser that people are excited to use, rather than one that they dread using.
"Excited to use"? I don't want to get excited about my browser. I want to not notice my browser at all. I just don't want it getting in the way of my work flow. I don't think you could make an "exciting" browser anymore. They're fairly mature technology at this point and I'm ok with that.