I am working on a prototype web site (Ruby on Rails 7.0.4, TailWind CSS and PostgreSQL), and I noticed that the data tables were best viewed with a browser Zoom level of 80 percent.
Found in Firefox version 109 under View -> Zoom, this setting will adjust your current web page to magnify or reduce the overall page visibility.
The browser should remember your Zoom settings for individual URLs, but this was not happening in my case. After a bit of searching, I discovered an obscure privacy setting that was overriding that behavior. Open a new tab, and type about:config, pass through the “Here Be Dragons” warning, and then search for privacy.resistFingerprinting. Set the value to false.
But that raised another issue – was I opening myself up to unwanted fingerprint identification?
Browser fingerprinting is a complex issue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has some information on that:
What is a digital fingerprint?
A digital fingerprint is essentially a list of characteristics that are unique to a single user, their browser, and their particular hardware setup. This includes information the browser needs to send to access websites, like the location of the website the user is requesting. But it also includes a host of seemingly insignificant data (like screen resolution and installed fonts) gathered by tracking scripts. Tracking sites can stitch all the small pieces together to form a unique picture, or “fingerprint,” of your device.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/learn
So, just like we are all unique individual snowflakes in real life, our browser profile is also potentially unique. Not a good thing in the Age of Government Digital Surveillance.
EFF has a tracker and fingerprint tester at https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ that you can use on your browser. Test results for Firefox were the same regardless of the privacy.resistFingerprinting setting:
The Brave browser looked better:
So – Brave wins this test. I will continue to use the Brave browser for politically or socially “sensitive” searches, but Firefox will remain as my “normal” web browser, and also as my web site development test bed. As an aside, I limit my use of Google products (especially the Chrome browser), since Google loves to collect data on everything and everybody.
I should also note that I have installed the uBlock Origin Firefox extension. I don’t like installing browser extensions, but I highly recommend uBlock Origin as an exception to that rule.