Thanks for everything. I understand this may be a difficult ask but is there any alternative to the smooth-scrolling behavior while not being a fingerprinting vector? Some people find the default smooth-scrolling behavior in Firefox/Tor Browser very jarring.
Hi, sadly there isn’t an alternative as far as we know 
.
This is a problem, because I find the default smooth-scrolling visuals in Firefox extremely jarring and borderline unusable.
Is there anything, either now or in the future that can be done to mitigate the visual effect of smooth-scrolling without being a liability to fingerprinting?
If it came to it not sure how much I can assist with FF core features in this area.
Thank you.
Here is a test page (you won’t see any scrolling) - scrolling - note RFP is enabled and locked in TB stable, and ignores the two other prefs listed
The test is basically a binary one - is smoothScroll on or off. But it does know how many steps were used when scrolling an element of set length (which if it isn’t already, could be made to return more stable results).
There are a bunch of smoothScroll prefs in about:config which users tweak to get “smoother” or whatever (e.g. reddit threads), personally I can’t tell the different. So whilst I advise against it (you shouldn’t change anything ever in about:config), it is conceivable that you can alter the speeds/jumps to be reduced to something approaching no-smoothScoll - but be aware that I am not recommending to do this.
At some point we need to better address accessibility issues, and reduced motion is one of those
Some of my thoughts as a user:
For Tor Browser / Mullvad Browser, I believe we should always turn it off as long as there isn’t any viable alternative at the moment since the whole point of Tor Browser / Mullvad Browser is anonymity / anti-fingerprinting.
For Firefox, I guess it depends on user feedback. If most users really want it, we can turn it on by default since vanilla Firefox is pretty fingerprintable to begin with anyway.
1 Like
No matter what the choice is, not everyone will be happy. Upstream (mozilla) decided on enabled (and we concurred). IDK if they used any telemetry, but given the default is on and most users don’t really change too many settings, it probably would have said enabled is the (vast) majority