Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Windows 10's WSL is counted as Windows or Linux when computing this stat.

Are WSL users running browsers from WSL? curl at least sends no user agent unless you manually enter one.

    $ curl -v example.com |& grep -i agent
    > User-Agent: curl/7.52.1

It does send a user agent by default.

I somewhat regularly use Firefox from within the WSL. It's a privacy by obscurity thing for me though.

Doesn't that give you an amazingly unique fingerprint?

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

https://amiunique.org/

Seems so. But I meant more privacy on a local machine basis. That is, someone would really need to dig through the filesystem to find browsing information, rather than just looking at the standard locations.

I recognize it's a weak privacy measure, but in my situation it gives me a mostly private browser on a shared user account.

OK. This sounds like a perfect use for either private browsing mode or another profile with history etc set to false though.

Private browsing wouldn't save any browsing information, which is something I want. Also, using another profile would reveal that the profile exists in the first place. Using the WSL is much more hidden.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com