Updated BitWarden has some serious flaws. What's being done?

Not meaning to sound dramatic, but I have had to totally disable BitWarden on my M1 Mac running Safari because it causes Safari to crash, so it’s no longer usable. That is, unless I port over to another browser entirely, but I don’t really want to.

The square shape of the dropdown menu is not as easy to use as it was before when it was longer and showed more detail without scrolling and as others have noted, the load time used to be very quick, but now it takes up to 5 seconds just to load after entering my pin. The import feature, although improved in the way it identifies rejected logins, still rejects logins for no apparent reason, claiming they are over 10,000 characters when they definitely are not (LastPass has no problem importing the same).

Why has Bitwarden been “updated” to be slower, less easy to use and in the case of the M1 Mac, not usable at all in Safari? Hoping to get some info on what the plan is to address these things. Thank you.

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Thanks for the feedback!

Re: imports - hard to say without a lot of detail, but our support folks may be able to assist and find the issue.

For Safari - we’ve change the entire extension architecture to use the latest framework in Safari 14, and as such we’re still working through bumps in the road. Even though it was an update from 1.48 > 1.49, it was major in nature. We are tracking the issues in the latest release :slight_smile:

Please keep us posted with issue reports/helpful information here: Issues · bitwarden/browser · GitHub and we’ll keep working on improving it!

I did post separately about the problem with importing. Is the GitHub portal a better place to go to report issues than right here? It would be good to know exactly where it best to let you know.

There was no news on your website about the latest update or any issues. It would be great if you posted release notes and updated them so that we know you are aware of issues.

Thank you for your work on BitWarden.

GitHub is the best place for issue reporting, absolutely - thank you for clarifying!

We post our release notes on our help site here: Release Notes | Bitwarden Help & Support

You can also see status updates and history here: https://status.bitwarden.com (and an RSS feed, too! :sunglasses:)

The release notes says that the desktop version is 1.25.1, but the app store version is still 1.25 and that’s what I have installed. I have to install from the app store to get the working Safari plugin, which right now does not work on the M1, but does on my older iMac.

I don’t know if this 1.25.1 iteration fixes any of the issues I raised or not. I have emailed support, which previously had been right on the case getting back to me, but now I am getting no responses. Maybe they are busier?

1.25.1 will be updated shortly in the App Store. The crashing issues seem to have been related to the extension being non-universal and the desktop app being universal, so that should be addressed.

Oh, also on the GitHub issues, please comment on existing issues if possible instead of creating new ones, it helps us keep things tidy :+1:

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Ah, right. I will do that. Any plans to fix the size of the drop down window in the browser extension and the load time?

Yes, fixes for the window size are underway. The load time I’ll have to check on :slight_smile:

Just installed 1.25.1 on my M1 Mac and it crashed multiple times as soon as I went to a certain website in Safari. Disabled the extension, no crashing. So still unable to use it on my M1 MacBook Air. The website that crashed Safari in this case was TSLA Stock Forecast, Price & News (Tesla) | MarketBeat

Thanks for the update! I can reproduce this as well. Hopefully, Apple will get back to us on our request on FB9047055.

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I think you meant the other way around (Desktop is non-universal, Browser is universal).
This hasn’t been fixed on 1.25.1:

❯ file /Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/PlugIns/safari.appex/Contents/MacOS/safari
/Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/PlugIns/safari.appex/Contents/MacOS/safari: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64]
/Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/PlugIns/safari.appex/Contents/MacOS/safari (for architecture x86_64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/PlugIns/safari.appex/Contents/MacOS/safari (for architecture arm64):	Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

❯ file /Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitwarden
/Applications/Bitwarden.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitwarden: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

I see some effort going into fixing build, which may have not been ready for 1.25.1:

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Is it possible to go back to the previous version which worked on the M1? I think that would be 1.24. I don’t see any actual improvements to 1.25 which make any difference to me.

We are going to distribute a ‘frozen in time’ version (that works on safari 13) that has updates turned off (so you’re not asked constantly). It’ll be released here:

But if I install 1.24.6 from this site, will it work with Safari, or does it have to be from the app store?

The old version didn’t need to be from the app store, only the Safari 14+ version.

Right, but i would be using it with Safari 14+, so will it work?

Yep, should be fine :sunglasses:

Seems not.

Biometrics won’t work, but the extension will work in Safari again.

Is the idea to include legacy extension inside MAS app still planned?

That would be the main way to get MAS-version (for Biometrics and up-to-date desktop app) with an option to enable the more stable legacy Safari App Extension.