navigator.webdriver does not assert WebDriver control
Check id webdriver-off
What an ordinary browser yields
true is a finding; false or undefined is unclassified rather than evidence of a human.
What a detector infers
This check is intentionally one-way. The WebDriver specification defines navigator.webdriver as the browser's assertion that it is under remote control, so true is direct evidence. False or undefined is not a pass: launch flags and patched builds can suppress the value, so absence proves nothing and is reported N/A. Descriptor integrity is evaluated separately.
How to resolve it
Launch the browser without the automation flag (--enable-automation and the WebDriver-enabled launch path both set this). Clearcote's engine returns false natively. Do not patch this with a userland Object.defineProperty — the value would read false while the descriptor shape becomes a new contradiction.
Read in the wild by
PerimeterX / HUMAN
Collects navigator.webdriver twice over: once coerced to a string, and separately as its own field recording whether the property exists on navigator at all.
PerimeterX main.min.js (ifood deployment): `function AL(){return hU[AC]+""}` and `function AM(){return AC in hU?1:0}`, where `hU=navigator` and `AC=hQ(512)`, with the script's string table resolving 512 to "webdriver" (hQ_map.json:514). Their results land in the EV2 payload at main.min.js:7710-7711 as `t[hQ(745)]=t["GCQtLl1BLR0="]=AL()` and `t["aRVcHy92XiQ="]=t["QS00ZwRJNFE="]=AM()`; captured payloads carry "GCQtLl1BLR0=": "false" and "QS00ZwRJNFE=": 1 (ev2_template.json:106,108 and all six samples in stample/ifood/sample/*/decoded_payload_2.json).
CreepJS
CreepJS, an open-source research demo rather than a production detector, reads navigator.webdriver directly: its webDriverIsOn flag trips on a truthy value, on its own lie-detector flagging the property, or — behind a CSS feature test — on the property being absent entirely. It is one of three inputs to CreepJS's headless rating.
src/headless/index.ts lines 97-102, inside `headless: { ... }`: `webDriverIsOn: ((CSS.supports('border-end-end-radius: initial') && navigator.webdriver === undefined) || !!navigator.webdriver || !!lieProps['Navigator.webdriver'])` — and line 167: `const headlessRating = +((headlessKeys.filter((key) => headless[key]).length / headlessKeys.length) * 100).toFixed(0)`, where `headless` holds exactly three keys (webDriverIsOn, hasHeadlessUA, hasHeadlessWorkerUA).
Kasada
Reads the automation flag in BOTH realms, because an override installed on the page's navigator does not follow into a fresh iframe.
window_navigator_webdriver, iframe_navigator_webdriver
Kasada ips.js teardown — the full 427-probe listEvery attribution traces to a published artifact. See the sources and their limits.
Nearby checks in Automation surface
- navigator.webdriver is a native prototype getter returning false
webdriver-descriptor-integrityRather than reading the value, this check inspects the property's shape: it requires a getter on Navigator.prototype whose… - no Selenium / Puppeteer / Playwright globals
automation-globalsThis check tests a fixed list of roughly two dozen known names against both window and document (Selenium's __webdriver_evaluate /… - DevTools Runtime serialization is not active
runtime-enable-leakAn attached DevTools Runtime domain serialises console arguments and reads an Error stack accessor. - No Puppeteer / Playwright sourceURL marker
sourceurl-leakPuppeteer and Playwright evaluation labels can appear in main-world Error stacks. - No controller code crossed the main-world canary
main-world-executionAn early DOM canary records main-world calls, but page code and extensions can also call it, so this is contextual. - No exposed Puppeteer / Playwright binding
exposed-binding-leaksExposed functions leave Playwright/Puppeteer registries, prefixes, source text, or __installed markers. - Content Security Policy is enforced
csp-bypassThe audit excludes data: scripts. Execution despite script-src is direct CSP-bypass behavior. - window.chrome present for a Chrome UA
chrome-objectThis is a cross-check, not a probe of window.chrome's contents: it first decides whether the browser claims to be Chrome (a Chrome/ token in…
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 webdriver-off belongs to.