the time a hidden frame takes to be created and measured in is reported
Contextual only. The elapsed time to create a hidden same-origin frame and run a small batch of layout probes inside it is reported, not judged.
What a detector infers
The second failure mode of the hidden-frame modality, and one nothing in this audit could previously report: not a wrong answer, but no answer in time. The agent races its shared-frame collectors against a timeout and emits a distinct frame-unavailable status when it loses.
A build slow enough to lose that race consistently therefore ships a whole cluster of those codes — and that cluster is a rarer, more legible signature than any of the values it failed to send would have been. It is the same reasoning as unstable canvas: the failure to produce a value is louder than the value.
Deliberately REPORTED and never scored, because a budget is a threshold and a threshold on someone else's machine convicts ordinary visitors for being busy — a loaded laptop, a throttled background tab and a cold GPU all cross it honestly. The number is shown so it can be compared against a control run on a known-good browser, which is the only comparison that means anything here.
How to resolve it
Nothing to set. If this number is much larger on a build than on stock Chrome on the same machine, the cost is in frame creation or first layout — which is where a collector's timeout lands, and losing that race is itself the signal.
Nearby checks in Render & GPU
- the WebGL2 element-count limits are reported beside the renderer that claims them
webgl-max-elements-readoutMAX_ELEMENTS_INDICES and MAX_ELEMENTS_VERTICES are hints the driver publishes about how many indices and vertices it draws efficiently in… - the WebGPU preferred canvas format is reported beside the claimed platform
webgpu-canvas-format-readoutnavigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat() returns the texture byte order the platform's compositor wants to be handed — and that preference… - drawing the same scene twice produces the same pixels
canvas-repeat-render-determinismCanvas noise is usually reasoned about as a trade: give up a stable hash, gain an unlinkable one. - reading the same framebuffer twice returns the same bytes
webgl-repeat-readback-determinismThe same assertion as the canvas row beside it, asked one layer down the graphics stack, and separate from it because a build can be… - MathML scripts are shaped with real metrics, not flattened to text
mathml-metrics-vs-osMathML metrics sit in the long tail of a deployed collector's signal inventory, read through an <mmultiscripts> element. - a hidden child realm lays text out exactly as the page does
hidden-iframe-layout-agreementA deployed commercial agent does not run most of its collectors in the page. - GPU-side pass timing is reported beside the wall clock
webgpu-timestamp-vs-wallclockA deployed commercial agent's GPU collector is not a pixel hash. - the same surfaces sampled twice in one page return the same answers
answer-stability-across-passesThis is the two repeat-render rows generalised across every surface at once, and the argument for it comes from how detector scores actually…
Clearcote is a browser built for fingerprint coherence
It is a Chromium fork, maintained by the same people who wrote this reference. It ships as a compiled browser rather than as a stealth script injected into someone else's — which is a description of how it is built, and is not an argument about how it behaves on this check.
This audit takes no position on how Clearcote scores on Render & GPU checks, on this one, or anywhere else. It has no baseline corpus of other people's fingerprints to rank you against and no vendor scoreboard — nearly every check is self-referential, asking one browser the same question through two independent APIs and reporting whether both answers can be true at once. It runs identically on any browser, including ours. Run it on yours and read the result yourself.
See the other checks in Render & GPU — the family hidden-iframe-completion-budget belongs to.