Which setting disables camera access? Defaults break Zoom calls for me

[acid-bong]

I created the profile with the website and tried to enter the Zoom convo. On the test page (where you enter your name and try mic and camera; i'm not registered) by default on the Zoom level camera and microphone are on, and it should prompt me to enable them in the browser. Instead, it doesn't prompt me, and I cannot uncheck them in Zoom.

Should i uncheck the "Disable sensors" parameter or a different one(s)?

[allo-]

Should i uncheck the "Disable sensors" parameter or a different one(s)?

Try it in about:config and see. The last page shows a preview of the generated options and you can try them one by one. The sensors should probably be not related, as it is about other other kinds of sensors (I think especially on mobile devices to allow apps to detect the device orientation and so on).

A direct setting for disabling camera access is not included, as Firefox asks before allowing access anyway. But there are probably settings that can prevent Zoom from detecting that you could allow access. And the WebRTC setting will break most video conferencing Webapps.

[acid-bong]

It's not WebRTC. Other media-related toggles i've found (media.navigator.enable and WebGL) aren't related either. They all are also disabled in Arkenfox's config, but Zoom (and also tabs playback in songsterr.com) works there

[smokelore]

I'm having this same issue as well, more than a year later.

At first I noticed that Google Meet was not able to access my camera or microphone. The page didn't even request access, so I pressed Ctrl+i to access page info and manually allow it access to my camera and microphone and refreshed and that did not resolve it.

I tried a number of other websites that require access to the camera and they all told me that my browser was not supported. After trying a number of other things, I uninstalled Firefox completely and removed all of its files in Program Files and %APPDATA%. I then reinstalled Firefox and Google Meet properly asked for camera/microphone permissions and functioned as expected.

As soon as I used FFProfile to apply settings to a new Firefox profile, the issue occurred again on that profile. So it seems very clear to me that there is a setting in FFProfile interfering with the normal usage of camera/microphone on all webpages.

If anyone could help me figure out which settings to disable/enable in FFProfile to get most of the security benefits while still being able to use my camera and microphone as input in webpages, please let me know!

[allo-]

When it stays unclear after all obvious settings are not selected, you probably need to debug with binary search. Skip half of the remaining settings and test if it is working. If not, disable half of these settings, until you are left with the settings that break it.

It may be a combination of multiple settings, but on the other hand some settings are also clearly unrelated. Disabling URL suggestions in the address bar should not interfere with video APIs and so on.

[smokelore]

You mentioned deselecting "obvious settings" to try to fix this issue. May I ask which settings I should obviously try changing?

I understand that binary search is a valid way to go about troubleshooting the issue and someone should certainly do that. However, I'm not willing to invest that much time into making FFProfile work for me. May I suggest that an active contributor to this project look into it?

I'd love to use FFProfile. I only learned of this project yesterday and was excited to try it out, but it is not viable for me unless there is a known configuration that will allow Firefox access to my camera and microphone.

[allo-]

Have a look at the descriptions and possibly the preview of the generated options and try to match what can be related to your issues. I try to keep the descriptions helpful without the need to understand too much technical details, so I can't write here much more than there already is in the descriptions.

For example "Disable clipboard events" will obviously change how websites can use the clipboard in more advanced ways, while "disable search suggestions" should neither break clipboard nor video APIs (otherwise I would rather consider it a Firefox bug).

Binary search is the last resort, before I would try to create a minimal profile with everything that looks like it can't break things related to the issue, verify it and then have a look what's the difference to your full settings.

For video, I would suspect maybe WebRTC (mostly transmission issues, but I think the API provides a lot of complex features), definitely media device queries, maybe webaudio and definitely the anti fingerprinting extension, that breaks quite a few APIs (but can be configured to have exception for certain sites).

The list of settings is too large to know what every combination may do, the hope is that one can estimate most consequences from the human readable descriptions. If you isolated the issue I'd be happy to include the necessary warnings into the descriptions of the related settings. I want to add some "breaks" metadata anyway when I come to have time to implement some infrastructure changes.

[smokelore]

@allo- Thanks for the detailed response. I'll try your suggestions soon and if I make any headway with this issue I will report back! Thanks again.

[allo-]

Thank you for understanding. It is just hard to debug all users issues personally for a tool that is made to disable some features that websites otherwise would use. And some websites rely way too much on browsers having the default settings (or just don't test with anything but Chrome).