Disable Visited Links for Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Disable Visited Links for Firefox

github.com

9 pointsoceanstone16 comments

My understanding was that this security loophole had been mostly dealt with, with the exception of weird situations where you can trick the user into clicking on things based on the color of items on the page. Sites can't tell what color the links are unless you tell them.

Timing attacks still work in all browsers - http://www.contextis.com/documents/2/Browser_Timing_Attacks....

Does anyone else find it a little disappointing that this is essentially over 40KB of code whose only function is to set the layout.css.visited_links_enabled option to false? For that size, I was expecting at least functionality like per-site preferences (which would be very useful and beyond the default functionality of the browser.)

Most of that 40kB is eaten up by three icons. The actual code is 13 lines long:

https://github.com/ChrisAntaki/visited-links-firefox/blob/ma...

(plus a 14 line manifest file, 12 lines of test boilerplate and a 10 line readme)

What are some other useful flags to set in Firefox that don't noticeably break functionability?

Disable WebRTC with media.peerconnection.enabled=false

(WebRTC leaks your local network IP, without any user interaction. This helps differentiate computers on a network/VPN. Here's a plugin which provides an easier way to toggle this off/on. https://github.com/ChrisAntaki/disable-webrtc-firefox)

Disable plugin & mimetype enumeration with plugins.enumerable_names=""

(Our browsers oftentimes have unique sets of plugins & mimetypes, when you factor in the version numbers. This helps differentiate specific browsers, on a network/VPN. Here's an addon which adds an easier way to toggle this off/on. https://github.com/ChrisAntaki/plugins-and-mimetypes-firefox)

Thanks. BTW, I like your ambient music. I have it playing in the background right now.

Thanks, glad you're enjoying it

I’d be more interested in something that ensured that visited links were marked differently. Many, many sites go shushing up :visited when I would rather not have it shushed.

You could use one of the user stylesheet solutions to add your own styling. I like Stylebot, but I think it's only for Chrome.

Yeah - But I think you can do some of that stuff with the built-in Firefox Inspector. Just right-click and hit Inspect. On the right side of the toolbar click Style. You can try out styles there.

I’d like something more selective than that. Pages that don’t make them the same, do nothing; pages that make them the same, apply some algorithm to select a new colour which is likely to be appropriate in the context. Something like that.

A Firefox extension whose whole purpose is to set/unset a flag :) Didn't know you can do that with extensions.

Wouldn't making layout.css.visited_links_enabled false in about:config do the same thing?

It would. This is probably supposed to be a little more user friendly.

...why would i install a plugin to do something accessible in the user preferences menu?

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