Brave-browser: Fingerprinting protection mode unintentionally breaks several popular sites

[bsclifton]

Carried over from https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/2965

Several popular sites are broken (or were broken with browser-laptop) if you enable fingerprinting:

• Google Hangouts
• icloud.com
• dropbox PDF documents
• Google sheets
• messenger.com
• maps.google.com
• fonts.google.com
• photos.google.com
• sketchfab.com

[pes10k]

I'm not able to re-create on on some of these. Specifically, the following work with default config:

• maps.google.com
• Google sheets
• https://fonts.google.com/
• messenger.com
• photos.google.com
• https://sketchfab.com/

[tomlowenthal]

@bsclifton Could you give more detailed repro steps?

[ericdstoltz]

I'm running into this problem with google maps. It seems to effect smooth zoom functionality. With fingerprinting block turned off the maps zoom smoothly similar to chrome and safari. With it turned on the zoom function is impacted so that it is almost unusable.

[bsclifton]

@tomlowenthal the original issue has reports which include steps

[anto-christo]

I am not sure whether this is related to this issue but I just ran into this.

fonts.google.com

With Shield disabled:

With Shield enabled:

As you can see, the example fonts are not being rendered with shield up.

[srirambv]

@anto-christo You have Device recognition blocked so any kind of fingerprinting will not work. May be the site requires you to allow fingerprinting to show the fonts correctly. Try setting it to 3rd party device recognition blocked and see if it works.

[anto-christo]

@srirambv , setting it to 3rd party device recognition blocked did work. As you pointed out, the site needs fingerprinting. Maybe to display fonts in regional languages. Thanks for pointing it out !!

[tomlowenthal]

Looks like it's essentially working as intended on Google Fonts.

[bsclifton]

+1 from https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5073

There is a possibility we could have a more obvious UX to let people know device recognition was blocked and may be affecting their experience

[Yuki2718]

Is this only for popular sites? Fingerprinting protection breaks games on kizi.com such as https://kizi.com/games/down-the-mountain.

[pes10k]

@Yuki2718 we're in the process of moving to a new system of protecting against fingerprinting that should address the vast majority of these cases https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787.

This is under implementation right now. The immediate fix is to disable fingerprinting attempts on sites like this that you trust. But the linked to meta-issue will be the "real" fix, that should be released before too long

[Yuki2718]

@pes10k Okay, the coming change looks promising. How about creating a centralized issue tracker which gathers all the problem arising from fingerprinting protection so that any issue can be reported there and you can address each issues in an optimal way (per-site configuration for problematic sites)?

[pes10k]

Currently we try to use GH labels for that, instead of needing to continually update issue text. So, i think opening new issues (feel free to CC me and @ryanbr ) would be ideal, and we can label them accordingly.

It would also be fine to report those issues as comments on https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/8787

Thanks!

[pes10k]

I'm going to close this since its not actionable in its current form , and we're using #8787 going forward to track webcompat issues. Thanks everyone!