Bitwarden constantly generating and saving passwords in the background?

Recently I’ve noticed that my password generation history in the browser extension version of Bitwarden is always jammed full of generated passwords where a new one is generated and saved every few seconds without me having done anything. Some times once every 2 seconds, some times once every 20 seconds.

Previously, I had seen this feature only log passwords that were generated by me so it was easy to grab a previous password I had created but forgot to save but now it seems like it’s just constantly creating and logging passwords and it makes it impossible which one I actually just created and used vs ones it’s just randomly making in the background. My entire password generation history is jammed full and can no longer be scrolled after my browser is open for about 5 minutes.

Does anyone one else have this issue?

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@Jay_B Welcome to the forum!

The normal (sometimes annoying) behavior of the password history is to log a password/passphrase each time that a new one is generated, whether it was intentionally generated or not, and whether it was used by you or not.

This means that anytime that you open the password generator, anytime that you make any changes in the password generator settings (number or words/characters, etc.), or even when you look at the password history and then return to the generator, the generated password/passphrase will be refreshed — and therefore logged in the password history.

When you say that the history is filling up “in the background” “without me having done anything”, do you mean that literally? Are you physically not clicking anything in the browser extension window while this is going on? Can you have the password histroy window open, and see it magically add entries while you are just watching, not touching anything? If so, you may be experiencing a bug.

Yeah I mean literally not doing anything. I’ll just be browsing the web or not even at the computer. And I’ll check the password history and it will be full of generated passwords that were generated while the extension wasn’t even open or anything.

I’m doing further testing on this as I’m unsure if it’s some specific activity in the extension that is triggering this. If I just open a fresh browser and don’t open or generate a password in Bitwarden it doesn’t seem to be generating them. But perhaps when I’m editing an existing login, or if I just generate a single password it then continued to keep generating them perpetually in the background when I’m not even in the extension. It’s very bizarre.

@Jay_B @grb There was a similar report / question recently: Password generator history on edge extension generating passwords every few seconds

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Guess it has to be a bug. Simple reproduction steps…

  1. Open Brave browser in Windows 10
  2. Unlock Bitwarden with set to stay unlocked until browser close
  3. Browse the web, click on links, open new tabs.
  4. Open Bitwarden password generator history and see a scroll list of generated passwords

It was reported in these 2 spots 2 weeks ago marked as “added this to our internal tracking system”:

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BTW, I see it too now on my extension (Brave, Windows 11).

Me too. Since a week ago.
Both in Brave and Edge extensions.
Really annoying.

I can confirm on Ubuntu 22.04, librewolf (FF) 132.0.2-1 BW 2024.11.2

Looks like progress is being made on this issue:

Here’s hoping this comes to an upcoming update!

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