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In Tor, I see a border around every webpage. I think it might be to hide fingerprints, but it really annoys me. Is there any way I can remove it?

I am using Tor 9.0.2 on Windows 10

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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This new feature is called, "Letterboxing"

Tor Browser, in its default mode, is starting with a content window rounded to a multiple of 200px x 100px to prevent fingerprinting the screen dimensions. The strategy here is to put all users in a couple of buckets to make it harder to single them out. That worked until users started to resize their windows (e.g. by maximizing them or going into fullscreen mode). Tor Browser 9 ships with a fingerprinting defense for those scenarios as well, which is called Letterboxing, a technique developed by Mozilla and presented earlier this year. It works by adding white margins to a browser window so that the window is as close as possible to the desired size while users are still in a couple of screen size buckets that prevent singling them out with the help of screen dimensions.

If you don't want to use it, that's fine. Just be aware that using Tor Browser in fullscreen mode can help fingerprint you as a user.

How do you disable it?

go to about:config

change the privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing to false.

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    copy&pasting the same answer (for nearly the same question) isn't good practice... it would rather be a good idea to rework one of the questions to be more generic and therefor easier to find for other who are investigating the same topic. and then marking all other questions as duplicate.
    – DJCrashdummy
    Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 7:11
  • I completely agree. However, stackexchange does not allow you to mark questions as duplicate until a previous answer has been upvoted or accepted. I attempted that first and received an error saying that. This is probably something we should discuss on meta.
    – elmerjfudd
    Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 7:47
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    in this case i usually link the new or "not so good" (resp. with less upvotes) question via simple comment to my already given answer to still point others to it.
    – DJCrashdummy
    Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 13:31
  • HEY EVEYONE, IF YOU"RE HERE FOR AN ANSWER - skip to the last line. OP must have rev'd it or who tf knows here "change the privacy.resistFingerprinting.letterboxing to false.". If you're here to spoken down to like a child read the page of bullshit first. Thanks Elmer!
    – Ed Swangren
    Commented Sep 14 at 13:08
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Removing it will put you in the probably less than 1% of people that have done so, making fingerprinting you 99% easier, and honestly, it'd probably make uniquely identifying your computer 99.99% easier because you'd be 1 in 10000 to have removed it and have a specific device with those specific dimensions in full screen.

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    The question is about how to remove the gray border, not why it is a bad idea. Although this is very useful information, I suggest adding information on how to remove the gray border (with this warning you have already written) to make your answer better.
    – Swangie
    Commented May 30, 2021 at 15:04
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I don't make it full screen - but I don't like to be using it way it's letterboxed so I want to turn it off and make my borders what I want them by sizing the window myself.

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"... I want to turn it off and make my borders what I want them by sizing the window myself." --------- which is PRECISELY the sort of thing that makes indivuduals noticable, trackable, and personally identifiable ---- "duh"

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