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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Did it on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and got the same code on all three. In all three it failed to detect some apps, but the same ones failed each time.

When I did it in Safari it actually caused Apple Music to open. When I did it in Chrome it popped up a small square window where I could see it doing it's thing.

Firefox was the only one where it was silent.

But still, that's an interesting hack. Very clever.

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I "saw" the little square window in Firefox on Windows 10, but only because I was paying attention. It was down in the corner, on (for some reason) my second monitor.

Yep, same experience on FF. Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/YqbbfPt

> When I did it in Chrome it popped up a small square window where I could see it doing it's thing.

Interesting. In my case I saw the little pop up window in all three browsers. Otherwise same results though.

I just verified this on my machine and it was able to uniquely identify across Brave browser, Firefox and Epic browser (based on Chromium). I didn't check Safari because that's the browser I use the most and don't want to test on that.

The Epic browser one was interesting. That browser comes with a built in proxy for routing connections through other countries. I use it to get around geolocked content and sometimes for a tiny sense of anonymity. But seeing this able to identify it with same identifier as Brave and Firefox was a bit more troubling. But I guess that comes with the territory of all these browsers using the same Chromium engine.

Firefox somewhat famously doesn't use the same Chromium engine.

Was silent for me on macOS Big Sur Safari as well, except for the fact that it opened Apple Music without any warning. The author might want to remove the iTunes check, not sure how much entropy it adds anyways given that it is automatically installed on all Macs.

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