"Add Item" in Browser Plugin Disappears Silently When Creating a Credential

[square_eyes]

Some time ago I created a crucially important cred in Bitwarden. It is now not in my vault when I need it most. It has been a disaster for me, resulting in financial and data loss as this is not a password that can simply be recovered.

I have often wondered why a cred would disappear. I create and save creds religiously as I am in solution architecture. How could it be?

Since this issue I have had several others disappear - thankfully they were ones for services I could recover or reset.

Today I figured it out. It is a UX issue (leading to user error). This happened to me just now and I caught myself in the act, went back to the vault, and sure enough, my credential I had just set up was gone.

I use the Firefox plugin. When you click on the plus (“add item”) to create a new cred, then populate cred fields such as username, and to generate a password. If you copied the password, for example, to a CLI/terminal off screen, after setting up all other fields… the “add item” window disappears silently without saving anything! It’s not obvious in the workflow that you are now without any record of the credential. Yes PW gen tool keeps a history but it will be long gone when you need it if you didn’t immediately notice.

Bitwarden should either auto-save the current state of the cred, or leave the window open, and not just silently close. Otherwise, in its current state, it requires the user to remember that this will happen / has happened. But users are busy, and forget. It feels like your workflow has finished at this point.

It’s not enough to expect the user to manually hit save before they click off the window. There needs to be a much better fail safe.

Edit: Lots of edits for terrible grammar. I have covid so brain fingery not working well.

[bwuser10000]

Yeah, this happened to me not too long ago. Fortunately in my case, I was still logged into the target website and was able to create a new password without having to enter the old one as part of the process.

I agree, it would be nice if the “add item” dialog wouldn’t close until you selected either Save or Discard.

[Nail1684]

1. There is at least one (long-standing) feature request for that, so you can vote for that: Persistent Bitwarden UI and maintain unsaved data
2. A workaround for that is, I guess, to pop-out the extension window (by clicking the arrow in the top left corner of the extension window), because this popped-out-window will maintain it’s data…

[Neuron5569]

Hello @square_eyes and welcome to the community,

I am sorry to hear what happened. What you suggested may be related to this 2018 feature request:

Persistent Bitwarden UI and maintain unsaved data

When creating a login I often want to copy paste information from elsewhere. This habit got ingrained when using LastPass. The Bitwarden extension doesn’t remember any state, however, so every time I click away the extension resets and I have to start all over again. It’d be nice if the extension remembered my location in other contexts, but I really really want it to save state while creating a login so that I can copy paste.

I personally wouldn’t bet on it becoming a feature soon, so I’ll suggest the following workarounds:

1. If using a Firefox browser, use the sidebar (Alt-Shift-Y).
2. If using a Chromium-based browser, use the popup windows until you are done with the credential creation.

As long as those two above stay open, the unsaved info don’t go away until you do something else.

Also, if you are still logged into the session that you created the credentials, using the random password generator, the passwords may still persist (I don’t know the limits) in the Password history (Generator → Password history).

[square_eyes]

Seems I have no votes to give being a new forum user.

Edit: I now have a vote, which I have cast.

[grb]

@square_eyes Welcome to the forum!

@square_eyes

I use the Firefox plugin.

In Firefox, a simple solution is to open the FireFox sidebar whenever you want to use the Bitwarden browser extension.

[DenBesten]

@square_eyes

When you click on the plus (“add item”) to create a new cred, then populate cred fields such as username, and to generate a password. If you copied the password, for example, to a CLI/terminal off screen, after setting up all other fields… the “add item” windows disappears silently!

I use a different workflow to minimize the chance of loss. Here is what I do:

1. Go to the website’s registration page.
2. Click on Bitwarden’s “+” (new account) icon.
3. Observe that the URI field auto-populated.
4. Enter into Bitwarden the username and password I intend to use.
5. Save the Bitwarden entry.
6. Back on the registration page, refresh the page and allow Bitwarden to auto-fill the proposed username and password.

The advantage is that auto-fill is tested before the site even knows the password. I got in this habit not due to the bug you noted, but rather as a way to be sure I did not save the wrong thing.

But yes, silently closing “edit/add” windows does seem wrong.