An upper-case letter was typed with Shift or Caps Lock
Every upper-case letter typed on its own key arrives with shiftKey true or Caps Lock on. N/A when no such letter was typed; IME composition, paste and empty key codes are not counted (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
On a physical keyboard, a capital letter is the letter key pressed with Shift held or Caps Lock on: the key event for 'H' arrives with code 'KeyH' and either shiftKey true or the CapsLock modifier set. A key event that says key 'H', code 'KeyH', with Shift up and Caps Lock off describes a press no keyboard can make.
The DevTools protocol makes it easy to send, because Input.dispatchKeyEvent takes the key, the code and the modifiers as separate fields, and shiftKey comes only from the modifiers. Measured with Playwright on genuine Chrome: keyboard.type('Hi'), press('H') and pressSequentially('Ab') all delivered trusted keydowns for 'H' and 'A' with shiftKey false, while press('Shift+KeyH') sends a Shift keydown first and is fine.
Only the failing side is measured — no person typed here — and the passing side rests on how keyboards work. Only a letter arriving on its own key is counted — key 'H' with code 'KeyH' — so IME composition, paste and the empty codes that on-screen keyboards and some autotype tools send never enter the count.
How to resolve it
Type capitals the way a keyboard does, with Shift held around the key — in Playwright, press('Shift+KeyH'), or keyboard.down('Shift') before the letter and keyboard.up('Shift') after it. Sending the upper-case key on its own produces a capital no keyboard could have typed.
Nearby checks in Input & behaviour
- Every raw pointer update carries at least its own sample
rawupdate-carries-its-samplepointerrawupdate fires for each pointer report as it arrives, without waiting for the next frame, and Chrome builds each one from a real… - A mouse press landed inside the viewport it was delivered to
press-inside-viewportA physical mouse press lands wherever the pointer is. If the pointer is outside the page's viewport, the press goes to the browser's own… - A move only reports a button down after that button was pressed
buttons-without-pressMouseEvent.buttons on a move reports which buttons are held, and a button can only be held after it has been pressed. - The pointer never crossed a long distance in one report from rest
pointer-jump-from-restWhen a hand starts moving a mouse that has been still, the first reports cover a few pixels each as the movement builds up. - The pointer came to rest on a control before pressing it
settle-before-pressA person brings the pointer onto a control and presses after it arrives: the hand has to stop, and then the finger has to act. - Pointer path curves the way a hand moves
pointer-path-linearityThe check captures the pointer path across the pad and measures two things about its geometry: the RMS perpendicular distance of every… - Pointer velocity and acceleration vary physically
pointer-kinematicsVelocity, acceleration reversals, direction changes, and timestamp quantisation catch constant-speed curved automation missed by linearity. - Pointer events arrive on hardware time
pointer-event-cadenceWhere the linearity check reads the path's shape, this one reads its clock.
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 Input & behaviour 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 Input & behaviour — the family shift-less-capitals belongs to.