PALE MOON PRIVACY SETUP

I did a review of Pale Moon back when 27.6.2 came out in linux. I had mostly great things to say about the browser then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Pale Moon is a very useful tool for scowering the net. It has privacy at its core with a few implementations made by Moonchild, the lead developer, built in. I also mentioned the point that Pale Moon has a canvas poisoning feature in the backend, however, I wasn’t very clear about how to turn it on. I thought in this tutorial, I’d show with a series of screen shots, some of the useful settings and preferences that I change to make Pale Moon a bit more private. I also thought I’d take this time to rant a little more about some of the not so savory issues with Firefox which have recently come under scrutiny by various people in the the Linux world.

First order of business, if you haven’t heard, Mozilla recently added an extension into their browser which gave people ads. That’s right, they were ads for a specific television show. The fact that they did this wasn’t the problem, the fact that they did it without the users’ knowledge was. Mozilla has a mission statement wherein they throw around words like “Make the web free and accessible to everyone.” but in reality, they are still making funds off of it. They still use their users to test new extensions without their knowing and they have done other seemingly shady things in the past. I can’t say that you shouldn’t use Firefox, but what I can say is that so far I have switched and it wasn’t that bad. Now I use mostly Vivaldi and Pale Moon for all of my browsing. I do a little with Waterfox, a review for that later, but all in all, I haven’t missed anything much.

Now on to fixing up Pale Moon. Typing about:config in the addressbar takes you to a backend settings page for Pale Moon. This is much like the Firefox browser from which Pale Moon got its code several years ago. A funny message pops up on your screen warning that there are dangers ahead. This was to detour users from changing things that they didn’t understand. Just click on “I promise to be careful”. Here you may see a long list of possible changes, but these are fine the way they are, you only want to selectively change a few settings. The settings we are most interested in are canvas.poisondata, network.http.speculative-parrallel-limit, network.http.sendRefererHeader and geo.enabled.

To get to these settings, you merely type them one at a time into the search bar provided at the top. We’ll start with network.http.speculative-parrallel-limit. 

To change the setting you can either right click or you can double click. Double clicking brings up a small dialogue box with a character field. In this particular field, the number 6 is showing. Depending upon the user, you may wish to change this to 0. This is up to you, however, what this does is connect to links when you mouse over them. I’m not going to disable this feature, but you can if you wish. On to the next step. Type geo.enabled into the bar.

Double clicking this feature will change it to false. True and False are Boolean values in programming. This means that while something like geo.enabled is true, the browser will give out your location based on the location of your ip address. This doesn’t mean that it’s full-proof, my ip is from a town or two over, but it is close enough for weather and other sites to guess where you are. Next we’ll type in network.http.sendRefererHeader.

This brings up another integer value of 2. What this feature does is provide a clear header with your browsing traffic which helps sites see where you are coming from. To make this as obscure as possible without completely disabling it, we want to change this value to 1. Changing this value to 1 limits how much of the header reaches the site, thus limiting its tracking capability in this way. Double click and change to 1.

The final setting that I am covering in the backend of the browser is the canvas.poisondata feature. 

To get to it, type in canvas.poisondata. It’s another Boolean value and it is set to false. To change it, merely double click it to true. This will limit some of the feature and extension data that your copy of Pale Moon gives out to sites that ask for it. Granted when you block scripts your browser is pretty much equally safe from some forms of this type of tracking. Addons like Noscript and others will help. After changing these settings, it is important that you close and reopen your browser. This will ensure that the settings take effect.

After restarting the browser, go to your menu, select preferences and a window will open, this window will display all of your browser’s set options from which homepage to use, which privacy profile to use, which cache settings to use. To change these, it’s very simple, just tick or untick certain boxes beside what you wish to change. Go to the privacy tab. 

Mine already opened to there because I had it opened earlier. As you can tell, I have my browser set to always use private browsing. This essentially disables saving any cookies of any kind. It prevents me from starting a history database and it also prevents me from saving a lot of heavy cache which can cause weird behavior and also lead to certain types of tracking of my browsing. I also chose the custom settings profile because just using private browsing alone will not block thirdparty tracking cookies. Set accept third party tracking cookies to never allow. Set history to clear on exit, this will remove all the history that you’ve stored for this session. Select keep cookies until I close Pale Moon, this will ensure that none of your cookies are saved upon restart. Finally, click Always use private browsing to prevent any history from being saved in the future. Switch to next tab, the one marked Tracking and select the top bubble, Tell sites I do Not want to be tracked.

This is a futile effort as most sites won’t honor this request, however, there are a few who will, so it’s nice to set this. Next switch to the last tab in the series under Privacy.

These are totally up to you, for me I kind of like having suggestions during each session, so I leave them. It is important to note that you will only receive history suggestions based on your current session this way. Go to the security tab and select Warn me when sites try to install addons.

This is something Firefox won’t honor and it used to be very important. I still select it. Go to the Advanced tab and under the Network subtab click limit cache to and type any number under 400,

I usually leave it on default, but with private browsing, I never get there anyways. You could set this to zero. Under the Offline web content and user data setting, change this to always ask. Better safe than sorry. In the General tab,

you can set your homepage, I have mine set to startpage.com. Under downloads, I suggest setting it to ask you where to save files, this is just safer and there was a Chromium security issue which had some users’ chrome browsers downloading stuff without their knowledge in the past, I trust Pale Moon, but it’s personal preference. Still it is a good idea to tell it to ask you where to save things. Under Content tab,

make sure that block popups is enabled. You can also control image loading on this page, but I wouldn’t recommend messing with this until they come out with a nifty toolbar button to control it. There are extensions, but why have more of them when you don’t need them. They are a possible privacy risk as well.

Finally, I suggest using a hosts file like I do. They are quick and easy to set up when you have the sites bookmarked and the right script to set them up for you. I suggest MVPS Hosts and others. I’ll include links. I’ll also include links to my scripts where you can find a Hosts file updating script to be ran with root priveleges which can bring all those sources together. Hope you found this tutorial useful.

Hosts file links:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts

http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt

www.montanamenagerie.org/hostsfile/hosts.zip

Also this great hosts file that brings them all
together:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts

A script which downloads and builds a custom hosts file of your choice:

https://github.com/thedummy06/Helpful-Linux-Shell-Scripts/blob/master/Hostsman4manjaro.sh

Last but not least:

http://www.palemoon.org/

Update: To make the hosts scripts work right now, you will have to type sudo chmod +x Hostsman4ubuntu.sh in the terminal like so 

And then run the script like so

 This should work for you, I am currently working on making them more user-friendly, a more or less click on application which runs this for you, but in the meantime, this is what I have.