What you need to know
- Google Chrome has a new feature that lets you preview your webcam and microphone before giving websites permission to access your device.
- Many sites, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, already have this feature, but it’s not available on all websites that ask for permission to access your camera or microphone.
- To enable previews, you need to change the flag settings within Chrome.
Google Chrome has new features that bring some useful features found in Microsoft Teams and Zoom to websites that require access to your webcam or microphone. The “Camera and Microphone Preview” feature, as the name suggests, allows you to preview your camera and microphone through the Chrome browser. To use this feature, you must enable the experimental flag within Chrome.
Many sites, such as Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, already have camera and microphone previews, but some sites request access to your microphone or camera without providing a preview. A new option in Chrome allows you to switch between different input devices and make sure your camera is framed correctly. There’s also an audio indicator to show if the microphone is working.
This change was discovered by the latest version of Windows. You don’t need to run the Canary or Dev versions of Chrome to use the camera and microphone preview features. It appears that Chrome version 123 is required. Anyone interested in previewing their camera feed within Chrome can do so now. You should enable this feature now by following these steps:
- Go to chrome://flags#camera-mic-preview
- Switch the setting from “Default” to “Enabled”.
Alternatively, you can go to chrome://flags and search for camera to find the feature labeled “Camera and Microphone Preview.”
Microsoft Edge needs to copy this
I briefly tested this option using Microsoft Teams and a few other websites. Some sites already have camera preview features, but it’s great to have this functionality built into the browser. In some cases, you may visit a site that doesn’t have its own preview feature, and you’ll need to double-check that your feed is suitable before joining a meeting or starting a stream. Such options are always good and generally do not interfere with similar functionality built into Teams or other sites.
We hope Microsoft Edge adds this feature soon. For now, Edge only shows you the option to allow or block sites from using your camera. New features in Chrome let you see your camera, replace your camera, and check your audio levels to make sure your microphone is working.
It looks like there are still some bugs in the Chrome feature that need to be addressed. For example, this feature gives you the option to switch between different cameras, but this feature was hit and miss during our testing. It’s understandable that there are some issues, considering that the new camera and microphone preview features in Chrome require flags to be enabled.
Considering Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium, Microsoft could easily add camera and microphone preview features. The original source of information about this option comes from Chromium Gerrit’s post.
