Unit – Browser Permissions

In this unit, you will learn that the softphone interacts with your browser and that you must ensure it has permission to use your microphone.

Microphone permissions

The Fastcall softphone works through your web browser. It tries to use your computer’s microphone, but in order to do this, your web browser must give it permission. Modern web browsers will prompt the user to do this, and then will trust that site later on.

The interface for doing this will change based on your browser. A web search for “your-browser-name microphone permissions” should tell you what you need to know.

How to enable microphone permission if it was blocked before?

Change microphone permissions – Chrome Settings:

1. Open Chrome
2. At the top-right, click More and then Settings.
3. At the bottom, click Advanced.
4. Under ‘Privacy and security’, click Content settings.
5. Click Microphone.
6. Turn Ask before accessing on or off.
7. To remove an existing exception or permission, to the right of the site, click Delete

Change microphone permissions – Firefox Settings:

1. Open Firefox
2. At the top of your browser, you will see a padlock
3. Gear icon – Open permission settings
4. Microphone Icon
5. Configuration – Microphone permissions
6. You will see a list of sites that have requested access to your microphone. Specify which sites do you want to give permission, and save changes.

Media Engagement Index (MEI) and Chrome Autoplay

In Chrome 66, released in April 2018, Google tightened restrictions around their autoplay policy. In this release, Chrome stores a history of each user’s media consumption and gives a “Media Engagement Index” score. If this is low, then Chrome won’t automatically allow media (including softphones like Fastcall!) to play sounds through the browser.

The end result is that users who do not have a high MEI score (new users primarily) may not hear incoming softphone calls or ringing on outbound calls.

It is possible to disable this new behavior in Chrome. Navigate to chrome://flags, search for autoplay and change the Autoplay policy setting from “Default” to “No user gesture is required”. Restart Chrome to activate this change.