Browser privacy improvement implications for websites
- by phq
On https://panopticlick.eff.org/ EFF let you test the number of uniquely identifying bits that the browser gives a website. Among these are HTTP header fields such as User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Language and later perhaps ETAG and If-Modified-Since. Also there is a lot of Information that javascript can get from the browser such as time-zone, screen resolution, complete list of fonts and plugins available.
My first impression is, is all this information really usable/used on a majority of all websites?
For example, how many sites does really send different content-types depending on the http accept header, or what fonts are available(I thought css had taken care of this)?
Let's say of these headers/js functionality on day would be gone.
Which ones would;
never be noticed they were gone?
impact user experience?
impact server performance?
immediately reimplemented because the Internet cannot work without it?
Extra credit for differentiating between what can be done, what should be done and what is done in most situations.
