[tor-bugs] #32311 [Applications/Tor Browser]: Letterboxing makes me more unique

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Sun Oct 27 08:16:18 UTC 2019


#32311: Letterboxing makes me more unique
--------------------------+------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  yodoall       |          Owner:  tbb-team
     Type:  defect        |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium        |      Component:  Applications/Tor Browser
  Version:                |       Severity:  Normal
 Keywords:  letterboxing  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                |         Points:
 Reviewer:                |        Sponsor:
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 The tor browser's recent letter-boxing is driving me crazy.  I lose
 buckets of screen space, and according to the excellent panopticlick, it
 only helps a little.

 Vanilla Firefox (70.0): a unique fingerprint (I'm on xubuntu), but not a
 lot of entropy.   Nothing in the list of stuff stands out, but my
 combination is unique.  My screen size of '''1440x900x24 is 1-in-27''',
 and my fonts are 1-in-70 etc.

 Tor browser (68.2.20) with the new default letterboxing: screen size is
 '''1400x700x24 is 1-in-6k''' but fonts are much better at 1-in-10.  The
 fingerprint has much more entropy than the vanilla Firefox, but is
 apparently not completely unique.

 Tor with letterboxing disabled: screen size is '''1440x789x24 which is 1
 -in-100k'''!

 So, basically, vanilla Firefox has a less-unique screen-size than tor
 browser on same machine, and letterboxing helps the tor browser a little
 bit but not as much as it should.

 So, I'm thinking: panopticlick should publish stats on what are regular
 encountered values, including e.g. screen sizes.

 The tor browser should prefer then use this data set to pick common values
 and combinations; e.g. for screen size, pick common sizes rather than
 rounding down to a hundred.

 I'm also thinking the tor browser would be a lot more usable if the screen
 size was reported like vanilla Firefox; when letterboxing is disabled, Tor
 seemed to be claiming the window size was the screen size?  And with my
 strange choice of window manager on an obscure OS, that made it unique.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32311>
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