a build branded Google Chrome decodes the codecs Google licenses
Check id licensed-codecs-vs-chrome-branding
What an ordinary browser yields
A build claiming the Google Chrome brand on Windows or macOS decoding both H.264 and AAC. N/A for Chromium-branded builds, non-Chromium engines, and Linux (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
H.264 and AAC are patent-encumbered. Google licenses them for its branded Chrome; a Chromium compiled without the proprietary_codecs flag answers empty from canPlayType for exactly those two while still decoding VP8, VP9, Opus and AV1 - the royalty-free set. That asymmetry is the signal, and it is the clearest JS-visible trace of the difference between Google's build and an OSS one. Measured on stock Chrome 150: H.264 probably, AAC probably. Same brand gate and same reasoning as the Widevine row - it is keyed on the UA-CH brand the build asserts about itself, not on the UA string, so every honestly-branded Chromium derivative is exempt by construction. A build that carries Google's brand but not Google's codec licences is two different browsers described at once. This is the row that answers "what parts of Google were stripped" in the only way a page can answer it: not by enumerating removed services, most of which leave no JS-visible trace at all, but by finding the licensed artefacts that Google's build has and the brand claims.
How to resolve it
Build with proprietary_codecs enabled if the Google Chrome branding is to be claimed, or report the Chromium brand instead - which is the honest description of an OSS build and exempts it from this row.
Nearby checks in Navigator identity
- the host voice roster represents the language the browser claims
locale-vs-voice-coherenceThe voice roster is installed at the operating-system level and the language preference is set in the browser, so the two are genuinely… - eval.toString().length matches the engine (V8 = 33)
etslThe string a JS engine returns for a native function's source is an implementation detail, and its length differs per engine… - navigator.productSub === 20030107 (Chromium)
product-subnavigator.productSub is a frozen legacy constant, not a live value: Chrome, Safari and Opera return "20030107" while Firefox returns… - a build branded Google Chrome carries Google's Widevine CDM
widevine-vs-chrome-brandingThe ClearKey row in this suite deliberately refuses to score Widevine, and for the question it asked that is correct: "does a… - a Firefox user-agent reports the Gecko productSub constant 20100101
gecko-productsub-hardcodenavigator.productSub is a constant compiled into the engine, and the two families disagree: every Gecko build hardcodes it to "20100101"… - navigator.deviceMemory is a power-of-two spec value
device-memory-boundsnavigator.deviceMemory does not report actual RAM — the spec requires the UA to quantise it to a coarse power-of-two rung before exposing… - navigator.hardwareConcurrency is plausible
hardware-concurrencyThis is an info-severity observation, not a scored failure — it reports navigator.hardwareConcurrency and only notes whether the value is an… - the machine delivers no more parallelism than it claims cores
hardware-concurrency-vs-parallelismThe plain hardwareConcurrency row can only ask whether the number looks sane, because no second API reports a core count.
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 Navigator identity 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 Navigator identity — the family licensed-codecs-vs-chrome-branding belongs to.