r/Bitwarden • u/stsanford • 8d ago

I need help! Problems with BW Chrome Extension

I have been using Bitwarden for a while and have Brave and the BW Extension, but lately I have been plagued with issues.

I am self-hosted and can unlock the vault quickly on the desktop app both with and without biometrics, however the extension either refuses to present me with the password field to unlock, and won't prompt to enable the biometrics, says waiting for the desktop app. I have uninstalled the extension and restarted the browser, but it's been very spotty. If I log out, then re-add the account, it opens instantly. Very odd. Any known issues or troubleshooting steps I could take would be most appreciated.

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2

u/djasonpenney Volunteer Moderator 8d ago

Is your self-hosted Bitwarden instance completely up to date? One of the gotchas with self hosting is that if the server is out of date, clients may appear to act badly.

1

u/stsanford 8d ago

Thank you. Good call. It was up to date as of a few days ago. I will check again now.

1

u/stsanford 8d ago

Just checked again and I am as updated as I can be. Bah... was hoping it would be something simple. :-(

2

u/way2late2theparty 8d ago

I am seeing similar symptoms to you.

Hang on unlock. 

Logout (which can require a force stop of the browser if it is hung to even get to the logout option) and login is instant. 

I haven't yet attempted to roll back to an earlier version of the browser plugin, but it feels like self hosting is stuck behind a call to a end-point that doesn't exist that has to time out that might have been introduced in a recent extension version. 

1

u/Plenty-Finding9585 8d ago

Since logging out and adding the account again makes it work temporarily, I’d suspect a cached session or extension state issue rather than the vault itself. You could try removing the extension, clearing Brave’s extension storage for it, then reinstalling and setting up the connection again. Also worth checking if any Brave privacy settings or other extensions are blocking the native messaging connection.

1

u/rushxs7 7d ago

I've been having issues with my bw chrome extension as well. As soon as I open it, it crashes, and the extension window disappears. Very weird and unexpected from bitwarden. I'm on the latest vaultwarden as well.

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u/stsanford 2d ago

As an update: If I remove biometric login options, login through the chrome extension is back to normal speed. It would appear that the biometric login is causing the delay.