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A frame reports the browser window's outer size, not its own

Pim· Clearcote Research 2 min readCheck id iframe-outer-geometry

A same-origin iframe reports the same outerWidth, outerHeight, screenX and screenY as the top page. N/A on Brave (severity: warn).

What a detector infers

outerWidth, outerHeight, screenX and screenY describe the browser window — frame and all — not the document asking. A same-origin iframe therefore reports exactly the same four values as the top-level page, whatever the iframe's own size: the frame lives inside the window and has no outer size of its own. An override that computes these values in each frame from that frame's own viewport gives every frame a different window.

The 'window.outerdimensions' module of puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth does exactly that, setting outerWidth to innerWidth and outerHeight to innerHeight plus 85. The probe compares the top page with a same-origin frame. Every stock browser tested reported identical values; with that override in place, the frame claimed 300×235 against the top page's 764×570.

Only a simulation of the failure was measured, because that module only switches itself on in the old headless mode, which was not among the arms tested. Brave varies window geometry as a privacy feature and is N/A. It complements iframe-coherence, which compares navigator values across realms; this row compares the window geometry every realm shares.

How to resolve it

Size the real window instead of overriding window geometry per frame. If outer dimensions are overridden at all, they describe the one window and have to be the same in every frame.

Cross-realm coherence: why a worker must agree with the page

Nearby checks in Native function integrity

See all 16 checks in Native function integrity
Who builds this test

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 Native function integrity 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 Native function integrity — the family iframe-outer-geometry belongs to.