a build branded Google Chrome carries Google's Widevine CDM
Check id widevine-vs-chrome-branding
What an ordinary browser yields
A build claiming the Google Chrome brand on Windows or macOS resolving com.widevine.alpha. N/A for Chromium-branded builds, non-Chromium engines, Linux, and any build with no EME at all (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
The ClearKey row in this suite deliberately refuses to score Widevine, and for the question it asked that is correct: "does a Chrome-identified browser support Widevine" is a rotting table, because the UA string reads Chrome/150 on every Chromium derivative and a bare Chromium legitimately ships no CDM. This row asks a narrower question the browser answers about ITSELF. UA-CH brands are not the UA string: a bare Chromium reports the brand Chromium, and only Google's branded build adds Google Chrome. Measured on stock Chrome 150, the brand list is [Not;A=Brand, Chromium 150, Google Chrome 150]. So a build asserting the Google Chrome brand is claiming to BE Google's build, and Google's build bundles the Widevine CDM on Windows and macOS. Carrying that brand without it describes a browser Google does not ship. The exemption is structural rather than a maintained list, which is what makes it durable: in this site's own corpus of 618 profiles, 103 are Chromium-branded-only and 121 carry no UA-CH brands at all, so 224 machines are excused by construction rather than by anyone remembering to add them. GATED TO WINDOWS AND macOS because Linux packaging genuinely varies - distro, Flatpak and Snap builds differ on the CDM, and several ship Google branding without Google's binaries, so asserting there would be inventing a rule. THE FALSE POSITIVE THAT REMAINS IS STATED RATHER THAN HIDDEN: enterprise policy can disable the Widevine component, and a CDM component update can fail or be mid-download on a fresh profile. Neither is visible to a page. That is why the row is warn rather than critical and why its detail reports what was measured instead of naming a cause. NOT YET CALIBRATED AGAINST A POPULATION: the collector does not record Widevine, so this site's corpus cannot yet say how often branded-Chrome-without-CDM occurs in the wild. The row ships scored on the strength of the structural argument, and the counters it stores are what will answer that question.
How to resolve it
Either ship the Widevine CDM alongside the Google Chrome branding, or drop the Google Chrome brand from the UA-CH brand list and report as Chromium - which is what a de-Googled build honestly is, and which exempts it from this row entirely.
Nearby checks in Navigator identity
- navigator.language === languages[0]
languages-coherenceIn a real browser navigator.language is defined as the first element of navigator.languages — one preference list, two views onto it. - 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 decodes the codecs Google licenses
licensed-codecs-vs-chrome-brandingH.264 and AAC are patent-encumbered. Google licenses them for its branded Chrome; a Chromium compiled without the proprietary_codecs flag… - 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…
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 widevine-vs-chrome-branding belongs to.