Bitwarden has quite a few of these sad quirks.

It doesn't work very well in Firefox's private browsing. Only thing you can do is autofill by right clicking a text field and autofill from there, or the keyboard shortcut. But you cannot unlock it in private browsing.

Stateless UI is annoying at best. There's a few times where this has slipped my mind, so I paste a generated password in a new item, and then go to copy the email, and the new item is gone. If I didn't use a clipboard manager, this would have meant losing the generated password.

The browser addon is completely separate from the desktop app. It's annoying as it means you have unlock them separately when you need them. I used to be a 1Password customer, and I absolutely adored the seamless experience of the browser extension utilising the desktop app when it's installed.

Firefox extension need permission to work in private browsing [1], after I gave permission it worked for me.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-brow...

This isn't the problem. Re-read what I wrote.

They are trying to do some improvements to make it partially work in private tabs. If I understood correctly, there will still be some issues until they refactor the whole extension for Manifest V3 (deadline is Jan/2023).

https://github.com/bitwarden/browser/pull/2121#issuecomment-...

Oh my, thanks for that link, I hadn't noticed. It's disappointed that addressing this[0] took 5 years and a whole lot of denying it's their fault, and that it is Mozilla's fault[1]! All it took was Chrome introducing a deadline...

[0] https://github.com/bitwarden/browser/pull/2121/commits/9d81b...

[1] https://github.com/bitwarden/browser/issues/136#issuecomment...

The Bitwarden browser extension has a page with the history of generated passwords which might help

TIL! Though, it only helps when you generate the password inside the extension. When it's some other way, and you paste it, it's less helpful.

  >Stateless UI is annoying at best...

Agreed. I've been using Bitwarden for ages now and this drives me insane.

If you open the popup menu and need to copy/paste/refer to more than one piece of info from it [because autofill doesn't always work or for example, you need more info to login than just username & password] you have to go back each time and re-open the menu, then the sub-menu [if you have more than one account info saved for a domain], to re-find the saved info and copy the next item.

It's made doubly annoying by the fact that there's a button to open the popup in its own mini-window, which allows you to go back and forward to that window, copy/pasting all the 'stuff' you need. However, when you click this button, the new window which opens doesn't retain whatever was in it in its popup version. So you still have to drill down through menus to find the appropriate info again.

I reported this as a bug several years ago on their Github and got a ridiculous reply from the developers, saying that behaviour was deliberate and wouldn't be changed. Apparently they couldn't envisage a situation whereby a user converting the popup menu into a separate mini window would actually want to retain the info therein, rather than having to search it out again.

When faced with total pig-headedness like that from developers, my natural support for their open source efforts evaporates pretty quickly.

The search function is also piss-poor. I've got several Gmail accounts and quite often a site will allow me to login using my Google account. Obviously that won't show up in Bitwarden's popup, as I'm not on a Google domain. So I type 'gmail' into the searchbox and it returns every single one of the 100s of websites where I've got an '[email protected]' username, rather than prioritising the Gmail logins which I've actually saved titled 'Gmail <account name>'.

So yes, it's great that it's open source and free [for private use]. But the usability is pretty poor and the developers unresponsive to feedback.

Oh. And incidentally, it barely ever works properly on Android --even with all the required settings and permissions allowed. I might as well keep all my passwords in a text document on my phone. It'd be quicker than waiting in vain for Bitwarden to offer to fill in a login, then opening the app itself to copy/paste the required info and waiting the several seconds while it creaks into action, decrypting my vault.