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Comment by surround | Hacker News Reader

The Tor browser is really effective at preventing fingerprinting.

Not really. Even something as small as maximizing your tor browser window can indicate to whoever's watching that you're one of N people using that same screen resolution.

And sure, N is pretty big for popular websites. But the less popular the site, the less it holds up.

Tor is about the most effective thing we have, but I'm not sure "really effective" is fair. It gets the job done sometimes, but it also leaves a lot to be desired.

Still, I'm grateful Tor exists.

When starting up Tor, aren't you confronted with a message about not maximizing the window? I wonder how many users follow that and leave it as is.

Is there anything else that makes it not really effective?

>When starting up Tor, aren't you confronted with a message about not maximizing the window?

I've never seen that message before, but that would explain why it always opens up 'windowed'.

I'm pretty sure that because Tor Browser ships w/ `privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing` set to `true` by default since 9.0 [1] (Oct. 22 2019 [2]), users can resize the windows now without affecting their fingerprint.

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31059 [2] https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-90

We also found TOR effective, especially on the Safest setting (~10 bits).

Firefox comes close with uBlock, NoScript, privacy.resistFingerprinting, and strict privacy settings

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