[ranger_danger]

Why do you have JavaScript disabled? That would break the vast majority of websites. Plus it's the opposite of private because it greatly narrows down the bucket of possible visitors you might be (since comparatively almost nobody does it), which ruins any attempt to randomize/un-unique your fingerprint.

[chrismorgan]

It doesn’t break anywhere near as much as you may imagine. Nothing like “vast majority”. It’s a significant minority of the sort of sites that get posted here, but much smaller still in general.

But why do I do it by default? It makes the web better. Things load faster, memory usage reduces, annoyances don’t load… most of what you miss out on is actually better gone. Privacy and tracking stuff is actually more a convenient benefit than the main purpose, to me.

Similar deal with disabling font selection (Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above). Rarely it actually breaks things (three times in six years, all last year), and that misbegotten nonsense which is Material Icons makes occasional things ugly if you also block web fonts altogether e.g. in uBlock Origin (by default, Firefox whitelists some icon fonts for this reason—see pref browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist), but using your own chosen fonts only really does make things better.

Like sibling commenter, I use uMatrix to block this. Also I don’t have it enabled in Private Browsing windows, so they get JS, which I find a handy way of managing it.

[fc417fc802]

It makes first party fingerprinting easier, but it pretty much eliminates third party fingerprinting. It also improves the responsiveness of many sites and improves battery life.

I wouldn't recommend completely disabling it though. Use something like uMatrix to selectively filter things.

[ranger_danger]

> pretty much eliminates third party fingerprinting

Maybe, but there are still ways to send a fingerprint to a third party, even from the client side. For example you could inject a JA3/JA4/TLS fingerprint into URL paths for resources in the HTML, such as stylesheets or images.