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bitwarden
Firefox extension closes itself on any interaction/navigating away from window
Steps To Reproduce
- Click on the Bitwarden extension in the toolbar
- Fill in your password
- Get presented with 2FA Yubikey prompt
- Switch your keyboard layout (or perform anything that takes focus away) to be able to use the Yubikey
Expected Result
The extension popup to stay visible to be able to input my 2FA
Actual Result
The extension popup closes itself and reset its states, preventing login
Screenshots or Videos
Sorry, tried to to record it, but the popup itself isn't visible in the screencast (both under wayland and xorg)
Additional Context
Admittedly a problem for very few users, but it does prevent me from login at all:
- I use a non-US keyboard layout
- I use a Yubikey as 2FA factor
- A limitation of Yubikeys is that they expect a US keyboard layout to function As a result, when I want to use my yubikey, I need to temporarily switch from my usual, non-US keyboard layout to US, then back again.
This only happen on Firefox, in Chrome/Brave, the popup stays open. It also used not to be the case in FF and did work as expected before. You can also reproduce more easily than the steps described above by moving away from the browser's window using alt-tab:
- On FF: click on the extension, popup opens. Use alt-tab: pop-up vanishes, then windows begin to be navigated/cycled
- On Chrome: click on the extension, popup opens. Use alt-tab: pop-up stays open until you navigate/cycle back to the browser's window.
Operating System
Linux
Operating System Version
Fedora 36 with Gnome (both Wayland and Xorg)
Web Browser
Firefox
Browser Version
102.0 (64-bit)
Build Version
2022.5.0
Hi @pm98zz-c welcome, and thank you for raising this issue. Whiles it might affect just a few users, the team will make time to reproduce, prioritise and get into the roots of the issue. Very appreciated!
It has been always like that and is very annoying.
Workaround is to open BW in sidebar instead of pop up - in Firefox menu: View->Sidebar->Bitwarden
in macOS there is keyboard shorcut to do this quicker: ⌥⇧Y
on other OS when you go to the Sidebar menu it should show your platform shortcut.
This is a known limitation in Firefox. Firefox will close any popup whenever the browser window loses focus, or if the popup itself loses focus within Firefox. And there is to my knowledge no api that allows this behavior to be prevented.
Chromium based browsers keeps the popup open until you click outside it within the window.
Well, that's the thing. I've been using FF and the Bitwarden extension without ever noticing that behaviour for a few years now. It is very possible that something changed in Firefox at some point, I'm sadly unable to pinpoint when/how. Until a few weeks ago, I was on Debian, which ships a modified version of FF, call Firefox ESR. I never had that issue, and as I said, been using that setup for quite a while.
I've then re-installed and choose to give Fedora a try for a change. That's when I immediately noticed the bug/change in behaviour. Now, AFAIK, Firefox ESR is just standard Firefox with some non-free/copyrighted bits removed to comply with Debian policy, so they should behave the same. Maybe it was lagging a bit, I "think" at some point ESR was based of the LTS version, with some security patches manually applied, although I was under the impression it was no longer the case. Could be the behaviour did change upstream but had not yet reach the Debian flavoured version?
So, what I'm 100% sure of, is that it did not behave the same "before", "before" being not older than a month ago at most.
Sadly, I'm not of great help to be able to tell what the differences could have been between my old setup and the new one, given it's been re-installed from scratch, so I can't really tell which version of Gnome, FF, Wayland etc I was on before. Sorry again for the lack of details and clarity.
Right, not sure why I did not think of checking before, but yes: looking at https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firefox all versions of debian except Sid (experimental) are shipping FF ESR. I was on a mix of Bookworm and Sid, so presumably on FF ESR. As https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#From_Debian_packages states, ESR is lagging behind the mainstream one, which probably explains the difference. Not sure if it is worth investigating, and/or maybe reaching to Mozilla.
For what it's worth, it has been like that since forever. Check #443. It's been like that since at least 2017 on the mainstream FF.
As an alternative, in Firefox + Opera, you can also enable the sidebar icon to create a persistent experience.
Hrm, the lastpass extension does not seem to have this issue. As a recent convert this is a usability issue for me so I don't think its 100% firefox forcing the window closed, or at least there is a way to work around it at least.
And as we all know they got few more serious issues:) nothing is perfect.
It is a wee annoying but you can use View->Sidebar->Bitwarden or (at least on macOS) ⌥⇧Y keyboard shortcut
And as we all know they got few more serious issues:) nothing is perfect.
Oh trust me I completely understand. I was just pointing out that its not as futile as "This is a known limitation in Firefox." would imply. Frankly I would be super happy if I could just get the bitwarden extension button to open the sidebar by default, that would be was easier to explain to my wife than giving her a keyboard shortcut.
I used my last password manager from like 2010 until the end of last year I can say that I am super happy that this is the only real usability issue that I have encountered in the migration. If I had more free time and front end skills that didn't stop at HTML 1.0 I would attempt to help. =)
I'm not sure why this ticket says this is only happening with Firefox, I have the same issue with Chrome. The extension closes even if you're in the middle of editing an entry and you change focus to another application to copy text.
A user can disable this in Firefox about:config by setting ui.popup.disable_autohide to true. However this means you also have to hit escape to close the right click context menu.
A user can disable this in Firefox about:config by setting ui.popup.disable_autohide to true. However this means you also have to hit escape to close the right click context menu.
While this does solve the problem described in this issue, but the side effect is everything will not close when clicking outside of the pop-up, including the right-click context menu. When that happens, using the escape key can close the pop-up.
Facing this issue since our IT introduced BitWarden. Opening BitWarden in a new popup works mostly, but this button is missing at the login screen:
- Copy+paste the email from another password manager to login into BitWarden.
- Alt+Tab to get to the other password manager.
- Copy+paste the password for BitWarden, but BitWarden has already forgotten my email (even with checked the field like "remember email" (I am using a German version).
Login is not possible using copy+paste.
A Workaround:
- Copy+paste email to a text editor
- Copy+paste password to text editor
- Arrange both in one line
- Copy+paste this line to BitWarden
- Cut the password and submit the email
- Paste the password and login
Edit: I noticed the same behaviour in the MyJDownloader extension, so this is likely a Firefox issue. Edit2: The addon Kee (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/keefox/), which is used for KeePass does not have this issue.
This issue has the worst experience when trying to login with 2FA enabled. Annoying. There is no pop out into new tab icon when logging in. Thankfully the sidebar trick worked. Thanks @kapitainsky.
Hello, since this issue is not related to Bitwarden but rather to Firefox I would suggest to close this issue as not fixable and just suggest people to vote on this thread.
Hello, since this issue is not related to Bitwarden but rather to Firefox I would suggest to close this issue as not fixable and just suggest people to vote on this thread.
See my comment: https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/3013#issuecomment-2194179501 This is an issue with BitWarden and some other addons. But some addons like KeePass are working fine.
Hi, thanks for the info. Can you please provide a video or similar to show that the popup is not closing? I've tried installing the extension without login (I don't have a KeePass account unfortunately) and it closed as usual.
Sorry, I don't know how to record videos.
But I noticed, that even the popup of the Kee addon closes when the clicking outside of the window. But there is one huge difference in Kee: It saves and restores the state of the popup, while Bitwarden forgets the state of the popup.
So with Kee you can
- search something, close the popup, open it again and the search term and the results are still shown.
- enter username of new credentials, close the popup, open it again, the username is still there, add more details and save.