Currently, Bitwarden extension can;t connect to desktop app.
In January 2025, the Bitwarden desktop app got an update that included a new protocol for connecting to the extension. However, the Firefox extension hasn’t been updated since December 2024.
Meanwhile, Bitwarden has pushed out several extension updates in 2024 and 2025, which are available on GitHub, the Chrome Web Store, and the macOS App Store — but nothing has shown up on addons.mozilla.org.
My speed dial extension was reviewed few days ago and it was total 12 days in the review (usually it’s only about a week, but there seems to be many extension waiting for review now).
But my extension is “only” 3MB, this Bitwarden is 16MB (a bit overkill I would say).
The reviewer is just a normal human, so I’m doing my best to make it easy for the reviewer - providing easy build steps, change logs, nice code (with comments). So if your build system is complicated and your code is a mess and uses forbidden API, then you can expect longer review time.
I’ve just downloaded their source code and run the mozilla web-ext linter on it and it shows 84 warnings, that’s not great… (mine shows only 3, but I did my best to eliminate as much warnings as possible).
Thanks, I’ve been using this workaround since day one. The connection between the app and the extension is crucial for me. Without it, I’d have to enter a really long master password every other hour.
I’m not sure who’s to blame. Bitwarden could have delayed updating the protocol until they were certain all extensions were ready and available.
It seems like something unexpected happened. Did Mozilla find issues in the extension? Or do they lack the resources to review extensions properly? IDK
It’s off-topic here, but the point is biometrics. Another point: the browser isn’t the only application where users input passwords. Opening a browser to retrieve a password you are going to input in the terminal is weird.
You can set Vault Timeout in the extension settings to “never” and it keeps you signed in all the time. There are other timeout options there too. The Desktop app is not required for that.
If the extension somehow, either intentionally or unintentionally, contains malware or privacy/security risks, I’d like Firefox to catch that before applying it to my browser.
The price would be security; in this case, the key is stored on disk. https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/6#issuecomment-256244758
Sure, the user can choose something between 1 hour and never. But as I was already using Firefox Dev Edition, installing the extension from GitHub was not a problem.
I understand, and its your choice. For me, I secure my whole system and am not worried about chrome storage. I don’t have a shared PC, it’s just me, so I set it to “never” timeout. I just didn’t know if you were aware of the option in the extension.
