MathML scripts are shaped with real metrics, not flattened to text
An mmultiscripts box with four scripts measures taller and wider than its bare base glyph, because the scripts are really being laid out.
What a detector infers
MathML metrics sit in the long tail of a deployed collector's signal inventory, read through an <mmultiscripts> element. What makes the surface worth asking about is that almost nothing else exercises that layout path: an engine that ships MathML Core shapes the markup with real metrics, and a stripped or partially-built binary silently falls back to laying it out as inline text.
The assertion here is self-referential rather than a per-OS table — every current engine, Blink, Gecko and WebKit alike, ships MathML Core, so an element carrying two scripts above and two below its base MUST occupy more vertical space than the bare base glyph does.
Comparing the two boxes in one document needs no reference value, no population data and no mapping from a measurement to an operating system, which is what makes it safe to score where a metrics table would not be.
How to resolve it
MathML Core is compiled into the engine rather than reported by it, so there is no value to override. A build with it disabled or stripped answers differently from every shipping browser on a path a deployed collector reads.
Nearby checks in Render & GPU
- the WebGL2 element-count limits are reported beside the renderer that claims them
webgl-max-elements-readoutMAX_ELEMENTS_INDICES and MAX_ELEMENTS_VERTICES are hints the driver publishes about how many indices and vertices it draws efficiently in… - the WebGPU preferred canvas format is reported beside the claimed platform
webgpu-canvas-format-readoutnavigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat() returns the texture byte order the platform's compositor wants to be handed — and that preference… - drawing the same scene twice produces the same pixels
canvas-repeat-render-determinismCanvas noise is usually reasoned about as a trade: give up a stable hash, gain an unlinkable one. - reading the same framebuffer twice returns the same bytes
webgl-repeat-readback-determinismThe same assertion as the canvas row beside it, asked one layer down the graphics stack, and separate from it because a build can be… - a hidden child realm lays text out exactly as the page does
hidden-iframe-layout-agreementA deployed commercial agent does not run most of its collectors in the page. - the time a hidden frame takes to be created and measured in is reported
hidden-iframe-completion-budgetThe second failure mode of the hidden-frame modality, and one nothing in this audit could previously report: not a wrong answer, but no… - GPU-side pass timing is reported beside the wall clock
webgpu-timestamp-vs-wallclockA deployed commercial agent's GPU collector is not a pixel hash. - the same surfaces sampled twice in one page return the same answers
answer-stability-across-passesThis is the two repeat-render rows generalised across every surface at once, and the argument for it comes from how detector scores actually…
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 Render & GPU 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 Render & GPU — the family mathml-metrics-vs-os belongs to.