About
Browser Nerds is written by Joe Rutkowski, a web security researcher who builds and breaks browser fingerprinting tools.
Updated
Browser Nerds is a dictionary of browser fingerprinting signals. Every entry runs a live probe in your browser, shows the exact source that ran, and traces the value back to the code that produces it.
Who writes it
Joe Rutkowski (Joe12387) is a web security researcher based in the New York metro area. He has spent years on both sides of browser fingerprinting: building the trackers, and cataloguing what the defenses against them actually do.
Public work the dictionary draws on:
- detectIncognito — cross-browser private-mode detection, the basis of the incognito entry.
- OverpoweredJS and OP-Fingerprinting-Script — persistent browser fingerprinting libraries.
- browser-fingerprinting-resistance-research — a survey of the fingerprinting protections in each browser and how well they hold up.
- ShaderGhost — a supercookie that lives in the GPU shader cache.
- safari-canvas-fingerprinting-exploit — a bypass of Safari's canvas protections, fixed in 17.4.
More at joe12387.com and LinkedIn.
How entries are written
Each entry pairs a write-up with a probe. The probe source shown on the page is the same file that ran in the live panel, embedded at build time so the two cannot drift. Claims about browser internals link to the Chromium, WebKit, or Gecko source where possible, or to the spec.
Signals that depend on unfixed browser bugs are held back until the fix ships.
Contact
[email protected]. Corrections welcome, especially where a browser release has changed a value.