the best way to avoid being fingerprinted by advertisers is to block JavaScript by default.
Leaving aside the sheer amount of stuff this will break, you're serving to identify yourself in another way, but perhaps not to an advertiser.
Given the average website, the number of people using a real web browser (i.e. not bots, curl, wget, etc) who don't run JS is going to be absolutely miniscule.
It's kind of like turning on Do Not Track - most people have it off, so you're highlighting yourself by turning it on.
This topic comes up a lot on HN and my response is always the same. Try NoScript again. Give it a day or two and whitelist the sites you use a lot and trust. You will have a stunningly faster browsing experience and the number of sites that don't work will be surprisingly small.
We have passed a tipping point where all the annoying bullshit that depends on JavaScript to function far outnumbers the random websites that NoScript breaks. LONG time user of it and I just don't have much trouble browsing. It makes the web insanely fast and eliminates most annoyances.
I've been using uMatrix for some time (I'm a control freak, I guess) and I support this - you end up whitelisting a few sites here and there (or even just some aspects of those sites, in case of uMatrix), and the Internet becomes overall a much better (and faster) place. The amount of useless JS bloat on-line is staggering, and it hurts me that developers are actually defending this practice. Engineers should know better.
Can't say much about DNT, but I think turning off javascript absolutely makes sense.
If you turn it off, they can put you into the "disabled javascript" pool of users. So what?
But if you keep it on, they can query half a dozen APIs and get a much more detailed configuration of your browser. Which lets them put you into a much smaller pool and identify you more confidently.
And what's more, the more of us that turn off the script, the more anonymizing the "disabled javascript" bucket becomes, as well as the increasing the pressure on web developers to stop the js bloat. Win win I say.
I've been surfing forever with noscript, only white listing those domains I need.
Exploding cookies (the add on, not the terrorist device), and an ad blocker, and the internet is quite usable.
Leaving aside the sheer amount of stuff this will break, you're serving to identify yourself in another way, but perhaps not to an advertiser.
Given the average website, the number of people using a real web browser (i.e. not bots, curl, wget, etc) who don't run JS is going to be absolutely miniscule.
It's kind of like turning on Do Not Track - most people have it off, so you're highlighting yourself by turning it on.