Keep Vault Active in Two Browser Tabs Simultaneously

Feature name

  • I’d like to be able to have two or more Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari tabs open at the same time with active vault.bitwarden.com sessions.

Feature function

  • What will this feature do differently? Currently, if I have two web vault sessions open in the same browser, one acts as if it’s active, where I can navigate folders but cannot see any child entries for that folder. The other instance behaves perfectly fine. Usually, the new tab kills the old tab, but this isn’t obvious right off.

The only way that I’ve found to keep two active web vault sessions going is to have them open in two completely separate browsers. IE: One instance in Firefox, the other in Chrome.

  • What benefits will this feature bring? This will help make the modification and organization tasks I have a lot easier.

  • Remember to add a tag for each client application that will be affected

Related topics + references

  • Are there any related topics that may help explain the need and function of this feature? Not that I can think of.
  • Are there any references to this feature or function on other platforms that may be helpful? Not that I can think of.

Hey there, I’m not able to reproduce this one, I can log into both multiple vaults in different tabs and no issues with nested folders. Can you share more information on your setup?

@bw-admin,

I’m on Chrome 108.0.5359.126.

If I log into vault.bitwarden.com on this browser I can see my vault just fine.

If I open a second tab and try to open the vault the same way, I’m told to log in. I can see the Vault items list just fine. This is great as, with thousands of entries imported from LastPass, there is a lot of work to do in here to modify those entires so that they properly fit into BW’s scheme. In my case, I have many entries from LP that were imported as notes, and they’re kind of a mess and need to be fixed.

If I go back to the first tab, I can still see the Vault Items list, I can access items just fine, I can modify and save items. However, the minute I do this, the other tab gets kicked out of the session. This isn’t obvious until you try to look at the item that you modified in the other tab. The second tab won’t have the new information. You can open the item that was just modified and see the old information, but it’s not obvious that the second tab was kicked out of the session until you try to modify another item and click save and see a cipher error.

If I open a session at the vault’s URL (sorry, can’t post the URL more than once or twice according to forum rules, so I have to be a bit vague). in Chrome and Firefox, I get a different behavior:

Modify in Chrome, changes appear after a few seconds in Firefox. I can then modify a record in Firefox and, after a few seconds, they pop up in Chrome. So this is kind of my secret sauce, for now.

My preference would be to be able to do this in the same browser.

Probably the biggest killer is that, if I get multiple vaults open in Chrome (you know how easy this is, I’m sure), it’s very easy to pull data from an expired vault if not careful as it’s not obvious that an instance has been kicked out of the session.

So, at the very least, when an instance or tab loses the ability to get current vault information, it would be nice for that to be obvious.

Hopefully, this is helpful. If not, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to try and clarify my observations.

Hey @KatiusciaTahti thanks for the additional information, I was able to modify information on both ends, so I would recommend opening up a bug report on Github for the team to investigate: