Talk:W3m

Advice in Fingerprinting section is of questionable value

1. Trying to make the headers more generic by imitating other browsers seems entirely useless, since even with these settings w3m sends different headers than firefox or tor browser (which is what it seems to be trying to imitate), so any logging that even just bothers to log the HTTP headers makes the countermeasures useless.
   1. There is some values to settings like no_referer or accept_language however because they publish less information about the user.
2. The "disable cache" advice actively makes the user's fingerprint more unique by sending the "Pragma: no-cache" and "Cache-control: no-cache" HTTP headers, which no commonly used browser does.
3. Blocking cookies makes the user more unique for the same reason. If not having cookies persist between sessions is desired it makes more sense to symlink .w3m/cookie to /dev/null
4. Even if it send all the same headers, w3m would not be generic since it has several technical differences from more common browsers such as it only supporting HTTP 1.0, only requesting the main html document (and images), sending a different TLS handshake etc. Oneuseaccount (talk) 22:13, 5 February 2026 (UTC)