the dropdown change came from the browser, not from a script
Check id interaction-select-change-trust
What an ordinary browser yields
Every change on the gate's <select> trusted. N/A when no change was fired (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
The same isTrusted argument as the click row, on the surface where the shortcut is most common. Choosing an option in a <select> - by pointer, by touch, or with the arrow keys - makes the engine fire the events; the usual automation fallback sets option.selected and dispatches a change Event it constructed, which is synthetic by definition. Measured on Chrome 150 against SeleniumBase 4.51.3 UC mode: change arrived with isTrusted false, constructed as a plain Event with composed false, and with no input event before it. Dropdowns are worth a row of their own because they are the one interaction almost every CDP-based wrapper takes a shortcut on - the native dropdown popup is an OS-level surface the protocol cannot drive directly, so wrappers reach past it rather than through it.
How to resolve it
Change a <select> through the input pipeline: focus it and send real key events (arrow keys, then Enter), or click the option natively. Assigning .selected and dispatching a constructed Event is the fallback most wrappers use and it is synthetic by construction.
Nearby checks in Automation surface
- 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… - every keypress had a keydown behind it
interaction-keypress-without-keydownThe 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… - 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 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… - pageXOffset/pageYOffset match their scrollX/scrollY aliases
scroll-alias-coherencewindow.pageXOffset is not a second scroll position, it is a legacy alias of window.scrollX — the specification defines them as the same… - a focused child frame implies its parent document is focused
document-focus-vs-realmdocument.hasFocus() is true when the document OR any of its descendants holds focus, which makes it hierarchical rather than local: a…
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-select-change-trust belongs to.