Maybe I am the one missing what you are saying, but aren’t you just suggesting that the behavior should be restored to the way it was in 2024.11.2 and earlier?
There is one action associated with clicking the item itself (the item name, etc.), and other actions associated with clicking various icons, buttons, and overflow menu options.
Previously, clicking the item name would either open the “View Item” details (in the Vault view or search results), or autofill the stored information (in the Tab view). In the redesigned UI, clicking the item name consistently opens the “View Item” view, independent of context.
IMO, the new consistency in behavior is an improvement in UX, although it can be debated which specific action should be the primary action associated with clicking the item name — either opening the “View Item” details or Autofilling the information stored in the item. One could make a case that this should be the most commonly used action.*
I don’t think design decisions should be based on one user’s imagination — as a counter-argument to the above, I could claim that many (most?) users do not autofill by opening the browser extension popup UI. If a user routinely autofills using Bitwarden’s inline menus, or the keyboard shortcuts, or the right-click context menu, or via the automatic “autofill on page load” function, then the most frequent operation when actually opening the extension window is likely to be something other than autofilling (e.g., modifying an existing item, adding a new item, or looking up some piece of information). For this group of users, having the default action be opening the “View Item” view makes more sense than having the default action be autofilling.
But I’m just speculating about which action is most common (as is @jsperry!). The solution is to make data-driven design decisions, based on quantitative usability studies, A/B studies, telemetry, etc., and the problem is that such evidence-based design methods are not part of Bitwarden’s design process.
*The above argument is based on the premise that the default action (action triggered by clicking the item name) should be the one that is most commonly used. But there are also other considerations:
For the autofill action, there is a problem in that for some items (e.g., secure notes), autofilling doesn’t make much sense. So should the action assigned to clicking the name of a secure note now be different than the action assigned to clicking the name of other items? That seems like a reversion to the inconsistent UX of the old design.
If Bitwarden makes autofilling “too easy”, and especially since the UI would not have any affordances or labels to inform the user what action will be taken if the item name is clicked, users could be exposed to security risks. I foresee that by making the default action (upon clicking the item name) an autofill action, there will be frequent instances of users inadvertently autofilling confidential information by mistake — which could create serious problems. In the old UI, the risk was mitigated by the fact that clicking the name only triggered autofilling if there was a URI match, but this still results in the UX inconsistency discussed above (which would be even more confusing now that there is no longer a separate Tab view and Vault view, so the behavior of clicking an item name would differ even for different items shown in the same view).
For the above reasons, I personally feel that assigning the “View Item” action as the primary action associated with clicking an item name was the correct decision (even though it may take some getting used to).