every keypress had a keydown behind it
Check id interaction-keypress-without-keydown
What an ordinary browser yields
Every keypress preceded by a keydown. N/A when no keypress arrived, or when composition or paste was used (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
The UI Events spec generates keypress as the DEFAULT ACTION of a keydown - it is not an independent event, it is what a keydown does when it produces a character. So a keypress arriving with no keydown before it is structurally impossible from a key being pressed, on any engine and any platform. Measured on Chrome 150 against SeleniumBase 4.51.3 UC mode typing into a text field: keypress, beforeinput and input fired for each character, with zero keydown and zero keyup events across the whole sequence. The control arm - the same characters sent as a proper rawKeyDown/char/keyUp triad through the same CDP connection - produced the full five-event sequence per character. So this is not a check against CDP, which is invisible here when used properly; it is a check against the shortcut of sending only Input.dispatchKeyEvent's "char" type, which injects the character straight into the renderer and skips the keydown the keypress is supposed to be the consequence of. The confounders are all handled by declining rather than judging: IME composition produces keydown with keyCode 229 and no keypress at all, mobile virtual keyboards behave the same way, and paste, autofill and dictation produce input events with no key events - none of those can orphan a keypress because none of them emits one, and the row declines outright whenever a composition or a paste was seen rather than reasoning about an input method it cannot model.
How to resolve it
Send the full triad per character - rawKeyDown with key and code populated, then char, then keyUp - instead of char alone. That is three Input.dispatchKeyEvent calls, and it is what a real keyboard generates and what Playwright's keyboard.type already does.
Nearby checks in Automation surface
- performance.timeOrigin + performance.now() reconstructs Date.now()
clock-origin-coherenceA page has two clocks. performance.timeOrigin is the wall-clock moment its timeline began; performance.now() is the monotonic time elapsed… - the gesture that started this audit registered as a real user activation
user-activation-vs-interactionThis audit only runs when you press the Run button, and pressing a button is exactly what grants user activation — by pointer, by Enter or… - user activation only ever appeared after a real input event
activation-without-inputThe row above this one reads navigator.userActivation once and expects it to be true, because the audit is reached by pressing a button. - the clicks this page received were real clicks
interaction-click-trustEvent.isTrusted is set by the engine when it dispatches an event it generated itself, and it cannot be set from script - a constructed… - key events named the key they carried
interaction-key-identity-populatedA keypress the engine generates names the character it is delivering in .key. - the dropdown change came from the browser, not from a script
interaction-select-change-trustThe same isTrusted argument as the click row, on the surface where the shortcut is most common. - the dropdown fired input before change
interaction-select-input-precedes-changeHTML's "send select update notifications" steps fire input and THEN change when a selection is committed, so the pair is what the algorithm… - no automation pointer-flash artifact is present
pointer-flash-keyframe-artifactThe only row on this page that works by recognising a specific string, which needs justifying because a name table is exactly what this…
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 Automation surface 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 Automation surface — the family interaction-keypress-without-keydown belongs to.