[freenet-dev] Firefox and Freenet

[Matthew Toseland]

On Friday 07 March 2008 01:38, Florent Daignière wrote:
> 
> As far as I remember we have always been asking users to change that
> setting... I don't think that you can reliably fingerprint freenet users
> with it. Many websites give it as a "tip" to improve browsing performances;
> there would be too many false positives for it to be a reliable metric.

According to studies which were very highly regarded by the makers of the 
standards, more connections to the same site is usually a bad thing. Hence 
all the stuff like pipelining. Furthermore, if we recommend specific limits, 
we have to be sure that those limits are exactly the same as are recommended 
by other websites, otherwise they will still be detected. And they will still 
be detected - they're a very good data point in favour of Freenet, even if 
they're not absolute proof. Do we really want "I see you've been browsing 
Freenet lately" websites scaring off all our users? Maybe the spammer will 
set one up now! :) A few false positives wouldn't hurt it much.

But even if you disregard the privacy argument - which I'm not willing to do - 
there is the ease of use/initial performance argument, which is persuasive: 
very few users will actually reconfigure firefox's settings even if we ask 
them to explicitly.
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