How to unblock camera permissions in Chrome, Edge, and Safari

Try It Yourself

Check whether the permission actually took effect

Requests the camera the same way any site would, so you can confirm a permission change worked without joining a real call.

Run the free online webcam test

Click the icon to the left of the address bar — a padlock, a tune icon, or a camera with a slash — find Camera in the permissions list, and change it from Block to Allow or Ask.

1. Click the site-information icon left of the URL.
2. Set Camera to Allow, or use Reset permission to return to being asked.
3. Reload the page afterwards; the change does not apply to the already-loaded page.

Open chrome://settings/content/camera to see every site you have ever blocked or allowed, and to set the default behaviour for new sites.

This page is the fastest way to find a site you blocked long ago and have since forgotten about, and to confirm the global default is still Sites can ask rather than blocked outright.

Confirm a permission change worked with the free online webcam test before joining a real call.

Edge uses an almost identical flow: click the site-information icon in the address bar, find Camera, and switch it to Allow. The global list lives at edge://settings/content/camera.

Because both browsers share the same engine, a fix that works in one applies unchanged in the other.

Go to Safari → Settings → Websites → Camera to see and change permissions for every site at once, and to set what Safari does by default for sites you have not visited.

Safari differs from Chrome here: rather than a per-page control, it presents one list covering currently open sites and previously configured ones together.

If permissions look correct but the camera still fails, the OS Permission Doctor checks each layer in turn.

All three browsers depend on the operating system permitting camera access to the browser. On Windows check Settings → Privacy & Security → Camera; on Mac check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Camera.

On macOS a browser only appears in that list after it has requested the camera once, so open a camera-using site first if yours is missing.

Some browser extensions, especially privacy and ad-blocking ones, intercept media permissions before the page ever sees them.

Try in an incognito or private window with extensions disabled. Working there and failing in a normal window isolates the cause to an extension, which you can then re-enable one at a time.

To find out whether something else is intercepting the request, run the Camera Block Detector.

chrome://settings/content/camera

The site-information icon handles one site; this page lists every decision you have ever made.

edge://settings/content/camera

Identical behaviour to Chrome, since both are built on the same engine.

Safari → Settings → Websites → Camera

Safari also honours a separate per-profile setting on iOS and iPadOS, which does not sync from the desktop.

about:preferences#privacy → Permissions → Camera

Firefox offers a Block new requests checkbox that silently denies every site, which is worth confirming is unticked.

1. Click the site-information icon left of the address bar and set Camera to Allow.
2. Reload the page, since permission changes do not apply to an already-loaded page.
3. Open your browser's global camera settings page and check the site is not listed as blocked.
4. Confirm the global default is set to ask rather than block for new sites.
5. Check the operating system permits the browser itself to use the camera.
6. On macOS, open a camera-using site once so the browser appears in the privacy list.
7. Retry in an incognito or private window with extensions disabled.
8. Re-enable extensions one at a time to identify which one intercepts the permission.