Browser Permissions & WebRTC

Once a camera clears the operating system's own permission gate, it hits a second, completely independent one: your browser's own saved decision for that specific site. This is why a camera can work perfectly in a plain browser test and still fail on a specific website — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge each remember a separate allow-or-block decision per domain, indefinitely, until it's manually reset, and that saved decision has nothing to do with whatever the operating system already permitted.

When access does fail at this layer, the browser reports one of a small, standardized set of WebRTC errors — NotAllowedError, NotFoundError, NotReadableError, OverconstrainedError — and each one means something specific and different: a permission actively denied, a device that couldn't be located at all, a device found but already locked by another process, or a request for capabilities the camera simply doesn't support. Reading the exact error name in your browser's console, rather than guessing from a vague on-screen message, is usually the fastest way to know which of these you're actually dealing with. This category also covers the genuine architectural differences between browsers — Brave's fingerprinting protection can restrict camera enumeration in ways Chrome's doesn't, Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection interacts with camera-requesting scripts differently, and Safari's permission model resets more aggressively across macOS updates than the others.

If you're troubleshooting across more than one browser on the same machine, testing each one independently rather than assuming a fix in Chrome carries over to Firefox is worth the extra few minutes, since these permission systems genuinely don't share any saved state with each other.

Browser choice itself can also matter for reasons beyond permissions specifically — Brave's privacy-first defaults, Firefox's independent WebRTC implementation, and Safari's tighter integration with macOS's own privacy daemon each introduce genuinely different failure modes that a Chrome-focused troubleshooting guide simply won't anticipate at all, regardless of how thorough or well-intentioned that other guide otherwise is.