🔜 Auto-type/Autofill for logging into other desktop apps (Windows, MacOS, Linux)

[MDN]

+1 … also waiting for it!

[gcorreia]

So, I’ve been waiting for a long time for this feature (1+ year, or so), and this request is almost 7 years old, so people have been waiting way longer than me. Through the years, from what I can see in this long discussion, we only got vague reponses like

@tgreer

It’s on our backlog

@tgreer

as it’s a little further out on the roadmap

@tgreer

… It won’t be 2 years, I promise!

This one’s incredible, and the laughing emoji only makes it better.

@tgreer

this particular feature is in the queue

@bw-admin

with auto-type being in the research phase

@bw-admin

The team is continuing to research the desktop auto-type functionality

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From being on the roadmap

@bw-admin

Hi @StefanBC, you’ll find it at the very top of the roadmap under ‘Active Research’.

And then disappearing from it

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From having a “dedicated autofill team”

@gtran

Bitwarden now has a dedicated autofill team that will review our autofill implementation at large, including auto-type.

But then not earing anything concrete about it until now.

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Adding to that, the continuous growing of people requesting this feature, many of them (including myself) registering just for that, many people saying this is a dealbreaker for a switchover to Bitwarden, the sheer amount of votes this Feature Request has and this being the most viewed FR, with 189k views… With all this, how can you explain the 7 year wait? How can you justify having FR, when the one of the most, if not the most requested feature is, 7 years later, still not a priority?
Passbolt, a much more recent project, with what I guess, a smaller development team, just released their Desktop App, and have already planned this feature. How can this be? (I’m supposing that they won’t go on the same path as you, and keep saying vague responses for years).
If they actually implement this feature, I’ll undoubtably rethink my choice, and switch over to them. And don’t get me wrong, this is something I don’t want to do, I really want to change to Bitwarden, but at this point you really left me with no choice. Even if you, in the upcoming days/weeks/months, release a statement saying it is going into active development, and that it will be available soon, that “active development” and “soon” mean nothing right now.
I don’t want to come over as rude, I’m just saying what I feel and I hope that you take something from this.

Best regards.

[ShaneS (Shane Steinkamp)]

Yeah, it’s super obvious by now that Bitwarden’s dev team simply has no idea how to do it, aren’t interested in doing it, and are never going to do it. So what’s the alternative? Go back to Keepass?

[grb]

@gcorreia

Passbolt, a much more recent project, with what I guess, a smaller development team, just released their Desktop App, and have already planned this feature. How can this be?

It’s much easier when you only support a single operating system. I believe that one of the big challenges for Bitwarden is the requirement to support a Desktop app that has feature parity on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, along with the constraints inherent in the decision to use Electron as a frameworks for this cross-platform Desktop app.

@ShaneS

So what’s the alternative?

You could try the GoldWarden client.

[Rihards_Veters]

Will this feature ever be implemented?

[ne0.exe]

The feature is needed! Please devs of bitwarden, provide us this key feature.

[DenBesten]

Good news. Found on the January roadmap:

@gtran

Desktop (MacOS and Windows) native autofill of passwords and passkeys
…
Items listed on the roadmap are active, in-development initiatives from the Bitwarden product and engineering team.

[Bowgy4]

That’s awesome, Den! Thank you for sharing with the community.

[duminduweera (Dumindu Weerasinghe)]

Feature name

• BigSur Autofill OS wide

With the release of MacOS Big Sur Apple now provides a fully integrated way to fill in your passwords on different sites and App, all inside that App or site.
Is this planned at all? This feature makes is so easy to use BitWarden inside safari.

Here is a link where StrongBox (KeePass client) has implemented this feature.

AutoFill on macOS - Strongbox

[Kyle_Upton]

I would also like this feature!

[cho-m]

Looks interesting.

EDIT: Based on comments in Password Autofill extensions in Big Sur?, it sounds like this may be used for auto-type implementation (feature 158).

~~Sadly, I have a feeling that the size of Bitwarden’s customer base that are specifically “macOS + Big Sur + Safari” users isn’t big enough to prioritize this feature over other cross-platform feature requests like ✅ Inline autofill menu (formerly known as overlay popup interface) and https://community.bitwarden.com/t/auto-type-autofill-for-logging-into-other-desktop-apps/158.~~

Probably need to hope that an external contributor would be interested enough to work on this and open a PR.

Competitors that support this appear to be Apple-first like:

• Strongbox - only Apple devices (iOS + macOS)
• 1Password (? EDIT: not too sure of status based on blog post) - originally only for Apple users before becoming cross-platform

[arvinjo]

Agree, this should be built in

[xurc]

Agreed, this would make Bitwarden much more streamlined on macOS. It’s nice to see Apple provide such integration to third party devs.

Here’s Apple’s documentation:

AutoFill everywhere - WWDC20 - Videos - Apple Developer

[tomillr]

Feature name

Native Integration with macOS AutoFill API

Feature function

• Hook into native UI elements of macOS, with native support for TouchID and FaceID

• QuickType autofill suggestions
• System-wide autofill functionality for websites and apps.
• No need for additional browser plug-in Safari on macOS
• Code from iOS can be reused

Related topics + references

• WWDC video with further details:
  https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10115/
• Best practice: password manager “Strongbox” has a working implementation.

[aimuz]

I would like to ask, is there any plan to implement this function?

[Doglio (Santiago Doglio)]

It would be great if they could implement this, it works perfectly on the iPad. It is very annoying when I forget in the mac I have to open bitwarden and manually copy the username and pasword.

[chaws (Christopher Haws)]

Would love to have this. I use this on iOS with Bitwarden and love it. I believe this is the docs about how to implement it: ASCredentialProviderViewController | Apple Developer Documentation

[tomillr]

Any news regarding this request? Is it at least considered for a future release?

Besides Strongbox, it has also been implemented by Keepassium:

How to set up Password AutoFill on macOS | KeePassium

[frdmn (Jonas Friedmann)]

Any updates on this?

[MeJustBAD (E)]

Would also love to see this feature