Security → Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers

 
»arstechnica.com/security ··· rowsers/

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Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers. This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on the digital fingerprint their browsers leave behind....

Until now, however, the tracking has been limited to a single browser. This constraint made it infeasible to tie, say, the fingerprint left behind by a Firefox browser to the fingerprint from a Chrome or Edge installation running on the same machine. The new technique—outlined in a research paper titled (Cross-)Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features—not only works across multiple browsers, it's also more accurate than previous single-browser fingerprinting....

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You would think there would be an easy way to block your browser from having direct access to the system attributes that this system looks for.

IE - Do not give access to the system fonts, or 3D rendering info etc.

I assume this will obviously break lots of stuff?
Or is it as simple as killing off and kind of JAVA/Flash?

Since browser attributes already are in use as front line security checks I suppose this particular type of tracking could also be used as a security check for online logins.
If you consistently login to a site with the same browser footprint a login attempt from an unfamiliar browser could be used as a trigger for an extended validation login.

 
Yup. The validation aspect was mentioned in the article. I notice it in practice as well, when I bounce between using Linux and Windows systems. The sites that are more sensitive to security (e.g., bank, brokerage) notice much more frequently when I switch.