cloakbrowser@0.5.10.patch is applied by pnpm through pnpm-workspace.yaml and the lockfile. It does not update Chromium or disable GeoIP.

• Add the explicit ML -> fr-ML locale policy. GeoIP still supplies the exit's timezone. This is a browser locale choice, not an inference of a user's language.
• After successfully resolving the proxy exit IP, fill only missing metadata: timezone defaults to UTC, locale to en-US. Existing GeoIP values and explicit caller options/raw flags retain their precedence. No new API option is needed.
• Reuse that same exit IP for WebRTC; no second lookup, proxy change, or direct connection is introduced to supply metadata defaults.
• Emit one structured geoip_metadata_defaulted warning per degraded resolution, with missing fields, country code if available, selected defaults, and a process-local cumulative count. Never log the proxy URL, credentials, or exit IP.
• IP echo failures and unreadable/corrupt GeoIP databases still fail. A proxy gateway DNS/literal address is no longer substituted for an unobserved exit IP; this prevents transport failure from being accepted as missing geographic data.

The application catches Crawlee's fatal launch wrapper at the request boundary, logs a bounded/redacted cause chain, and fails only that request. Metadata launch retries require the caller's existing retry: true option and have a three-attempt limit; this legacy metadata error handling remains compatible with older SDK errors, but missing metadata now defaults before reaching that boundary. Other startup failures are not silently treated as proxy-rotation requests.

Regression: packages/scrape/src/__tests__/core/CloakBrowserGeoip.test.ts executes the installed SDK source with deterministic I/O fixtures for ML, BR, unknown countries, absent MMDB records, missing timezone, explicit options/raw flags, transport/authentication failures, and database errors. The real Crawlee loop regression is packages/scrape/src/__tests__/engines/BrowserLaunchIsolation.test.ts.

Upstream reviewed: https://github.com/CloakHQ/CloakBrowser/blob/main/js/src/geoip.ts and https://github.com/CloakHQ/CloakBrowser/blob/main/README.md . Do not remove the patch during an SDK upgrade until the same regressions pass against that release.