I believe I have found a workaround. After getting the error message below, I click on “More choices” and then PIN. In addition to letting me in, I am subsequently able to lock/unlock the same browser with Hello-Face. This does survive a browser-restart, but have not tested a system reboot nor how long the “workaround” persists found that that the fix is not permanent. After having rebooted a machine and let it sit for the weekend, Face did not work and I once again had to resort to PIN..
My failure mode is that Unlock with Windows Hello Facial Recognition fails with the message above, but Unlock with Windows Hello PIN succeeds.
I have been able to reproduce this problem plus workaround on the following browsers (all current), and often times using a fresh install of the extension.
- Chrome 134.0.6998.89 (Official Build) (64-bit) 2025.2.2
- Edge 134.0.3124.68 (Official build) (64-bit) 2025.2.2
- Opera 117.0.5408.93 Bitwarden 2025.2.1
- Firefox 136.0.1 (64-bit) Bitwarden 2025.2.4
All on Windows 24H2 (OS Build 26100.3476), Bitwarden Desktop 2025.2.1
If anyone has a Windows Hello Fingerprint reader, I would like to know if you have the problem in the first place and if this workaround helps.
Note: given the above testing results, I’m changing the title from “Unable to unlock with biometrics using Chrome Extension” to “Unable to unlock browser extensions with Hello+face biometric”