which OS hyphenation engine the browser hyphenates through
Check id hyphenation-engine-os
What an ordinary browser yields
The hyphenation engine matches the claimed OS: CoreFoundation (Finnish yes, Latin no) on Apple, Minikin (Latin yes, Finnish no) elsewhere. On a browser without loaded dictionaries it reads nothing, which is ordinary.
What a detector infers
When CSS asks a browser to hyphenate a long word, the break points come from a dictionary supplied by the operating system — and the dictionary SETS differ by platform, which turns hyphenation into an oracle for the OS family. macOS and iOS hyphenate through Apple's CoreFoundation, whose dictionaries cover Finnish, Polish, Catalan and Romanian. Windows, Linux, Android and ChromeOS hyphenate through Chromium's own Minikin, which covers Latin and Welsh but not Finnish. So two probes tell the two engines apart: a Finnish word hyphenates only under CoreFoundation, a Latin one only under Minikin. Measure the rendered height of each in a narrow box and you learn which hyphenator the machine is really using — a fact from the font and text-shaping layer, entirely independent of the libm-rounding oracle that Math.tanh gives. This is deliberately REPORTED and never scored, for two reasons that came out of measuring rather than reasoning. Minikin's dictionaries are delivered by Chrome's component updater after startup, so a fresh Chrome, an Electron app (measured: both probes fired blank), a Chrome-for-Testing binary or a locked-down enterprise build simply has no dictionaries and hyphenates nothing — an ordinary state for a large population, and no basis for a verdict. And the dictionary table is Chromium-specific: Firefox ships its own hyphenation data with different coverage, so the whole technique only reads a Blink browser. Where it does read, a disagreement is still worth showing — an Apple hyphenator behind a Windows user agent is the render layer contradicting the claimed OS — but naming the OS from dictionary coverage is the kind of table that drifts, so the audit shows the reading and leaves the judgement to you.
How to resolve it
Nothing to fix on an ordinary browser. If a profile presents one OS while hyphenating through the other's engine, the mismatch comes from the text-shaping layer, which a user-agent string does not reach — the dictionaries follow the real operating system, not the claimed one.
Other checks in Engine & OS oracles
- The measured JS engine matches the engine the User-Agent claims
js-engine-identifier-vs-uaTwo values are read straight out of the JavaScript engine itself: the character length of the RangeError message thrown by (-1).toFixed(-1)… - Math.tanh rounds the way the claimed OS's libm rounds
math-tanh-os-vs-uaIEEE 754 fixes how a double is stored but does not require transcendental functions to be correctly rounded, so every operating system's C… - the CPU architecture matches the architecture the browser claims
cpu-arch-nan-vs-uachIEEE-754 fixes the exponent and the quiet bit of a NaN but leaves the sign bit to the hardware, and the hardware disagrees: an x86 FPU… - the three heap numbers describe a possible heap
jsheap-triplet-orderingThis check replaces a retired one, and the swap is the lesson. - the platform's system font belongs to the operating system claimed
system-font-vs-claimed-osThe CSS2 system-font keywords — caption, icon, menu, message-box, small-caption and status-bar — are resolved by the HOST platform's font… - typefaces the claimed OS ships as separate faces measure as separate faces
claimed-os-typefaces-are-distinctA font request is answered by the host's font stack, not by the browser and not by anything the user agent sets, so changing…
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 Engine & OS oracles 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 Engine & OS oracles — the family hyphenation-engine-os belongs to.