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Comment by lucraft | Hacker News Reader

I tried the demo, fingerprint.com, in:

  - Safari
  - Safari private mode
  - Chrome private mode

and it was not able to identify me across those.

I then tried

  - Chrome (normal, non-private mode)

and it did identify that as a repeat Chrome visit.

Does Safari have better privacy than Chrome?

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Safari will assign you a random ip address on a per tab basis if private relay is on. With chrome there is zero plausible deniability as to who you are. You are who you are today, yesterday, and a year before, in every tab, window, incognito or not.

ip addresses are not used in browser fingerprints though

That's not true...they're a major signal

Yes by a lot.

This comes with some downside because to protect privacy Safari blocks some useful APIs. For example, you can't tell if the user is running Apple silicon or Intel. That means you have to ask them whether they want the Intel or Apple silicon version of a download. This is a non-trivial question for a lot of Mac users. And, sure, you can always publish through the App store but that comes with its own drawbacks.

A price I’ll gladly pay in favor of increased privacy, and I haven’t heard of too many people stumped by the question. In the worst case, you can just try it out.

Yeah for folks who are viewing this site it's obvious, but my target audience doesn't have a clue for example.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/buil...

There are a whole lot of downsides to that approach. Most applications don't do it, although perhaps it does make sense for the general audience like mine. Fortunately, however, a lot of Macs are using Chrome or Firefox that expose this info.

It’s also worth noting that nobody’s going to be shipping Intel binaries in a short 2-5 years so this problem will just go away on its own.

The user base won’t even be there anymore.

This is not just because people will be retiring old Intel systems, it’s also because Apple’s marketshare exploded when the M1 chip came out, so a very large portion of the userbase never owned an Intel Mac.

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