the mouse button was held down for a measurable moment
Check id pointer-press-dwell-duration
What an ordinary browser yields
A shortest press-to-release of tens of milliseconds. N/A on a keyboard or touch visitor, and on a browser with coarsened event timestamps (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
A mouse button is a mechanical switch. Its contacts bounce for several milliseconds before the signal settles, and the hand above it is far slower than that - a real click holds for tens of milliseconds, typically 60 to 120. So the interval between a press and its release is not a behavioural preference that varies by person, it is a floor imposed by the hardware. Measured on Chrome 150 against SeleniumBase 4.51.5: press-to-release was 0.1ms on every click and through every method it offers (click, mouse_click, click_with_offset), against 62-105ms for a control arm driven like a hand over the identical CDP connection. The cause is that a dispatcher sends mousePressed and mouseReleased back to back with nothing between them. This row matters most because of what 4.51.5 fixed: that release removed the tag whitelist that used to make clicks synthetic, so its clicks are now fully isTrusted and pass every structural row on this page. Duration is what it did not fix, and duration cannot be fixed by relabelling an event. The threshold sits at 5ms, which is below any human and above any clock artefact, and two orders of magnitude away from what was measured.
How to resolve it
Put a delay between mousePressed and mouseReleased. Dispatching them back to back is the default in most wrappers and produces a hold no physical switch can produce; anything in the 60-120ms range is unremarkable.
Nearby checks in Automation surface
- the pointer moved before it clicked
pointer-movement-precedes-clickA mouse reaches a target by crossing the document, and every position it crosses is an event. - arriving over a control and pressing it were separate moments
pointer-arrival-to-press-intervalpointerover fires when the pointer arrives over an element; pointerdown fires when the button goes down. - a held mouse button reported some pressure
pointer-pressure-on-pressPointerEvent.pressure is not a range to model, it is a constant to check. - the document was scrolled by something that can scroll it
scroll-input-attributionA document moves for a reason: a wheel notch, a scroll key, a finger, a scrollbar drag - or a script. - keys were held down for a measurable moment
key-press-dwell-durationThe keyboard twin of the press-dwell row, and it is deliberately separate because the two fail independently - which SeleniumBase 4.51.5… - movement while a button was down reported the button as down
pointer-buttons-during-dragMouseEvent.buttons is a bitfield of which buttons are currently held, derived by the browser from the physical button state rather than from… - dragging the slider moved it through the values it crossed
slider-drag-value-progressionA range slider is the only common control that has to be DRAGGED to be used as intended, which makes it the only one that produces a stream… - clicks landed on different points, not the same one repeatedly
pointer-landing-dispersionAiming is imprecise. A hand lands somewhere inside a control and the spread shows up within two or three clicks; a driver resolves the…
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 pointer-press-dwell-duration belongs to.