title makes it look like firefox is just removing yet another security feature as part of its enshittification process, but reading the article it looks like it makes sense
It does. It’s yet another data point used in fingerprinting, and not many people enable it. 'tis but a single setting, but combined with everything else they can track about your browser it is effective.
In case you want to run a test to see how fingerprinting affects your browser:
Yes and no. There are still plenty of things that get tracked regardless of JavaScript, and disabling JavaScript is it’s own mark they can track.
Do Not Track is one such request, but screen size, viewport size, language, timezone/region, whether you block ads or not, browser/engine version, and many more are all things that do get tracked without the need for JS.
All have legitimate reasons, but can also be abused by being tracked server-side.
The cover your tracks page on eff.org has some pretty good explanations for most things.
Fun fact, the reason the TOR browser launches in windowed mode is so that this viewport size tracking is less of a marker.
title makes it look like firefox is just removing yet another security feature as part of its enshittification process, but reading the article it looks like it makes sense
It does. It’s yet another data point used in fingerprinting, and not many people enable it. 'tis but a single setting, but combined with everything else they can track about your browser it is effective.
In case you want to run a test to see how fingerprinting affects your browser:
The only way to really stop this is to disable JavaScript?
Yes and no. There are still plenty of things that get tracked regardless of JavaScript, and disabling JavaScript is it’s own mark they can track.
Do Not Track is one such request, but screen size, viewport size, language, timezone/region, whether you block ads or not, browser/engine version, and many more are all things that do get tracked without the need for JS.
All have legitimate reasons, but can also be abused by being tracked server-side.
The cover your tracks page on eff.org has some pretty good explanations for most things.
Fun fact, the reason the TOR browser launches in windowed mode is so that this viewport size tracking is less of a marker.