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Comment by tmulcahy | Hacker News Reader

What about it isn't well engineered?

It's all just slow and mediocre. The Windows desktop client is a massive almost 400MB-download behemoth (and is electron-based), and if you have SSH keys you want to store in it you have no choice but to use it. Oh and you can't log into the browser extension automatically from the desktop client.

Admittedly the mobile clients have since been rewritten to be native (they were _really_ slow before), but Keyguard is still much faster/lighter.

I started using 1Password at work and it's just a.. nicer experience? It does all this and more. Everything is fast, the browser extension is more proactive/recognises fields better (Bitwarden can't really do multi step logins), and the desktop client isn't a chore to use.

The best comparison I would give is comparing Immich and Jellyfin (if you've used these), they are miles apart in terms of end user experience/polish/efficient design. One is engineered, the other feels like it's been hacked together by hobbyists.

Same goes for the bitwarden cli (`bw`). Its super slow and if you use it in scripts to pull multiple values (username, password), it takes ages. I personally switched to rbw (https://github.com/doy/rbw) and its day and night.

The main thing is it's just slow as molasses, just clicking the extension icon can sometimes take over a second to show anything.

And it frequently fails to detect login fields, or does detect but fails to fill them with a generic error.

Syncing is iffy. Saving credentials associated to a shared org fails randomly. Rendering (x11/Firefox) sometimes fails completely, but is predictably slow. Auto fill can be buggy. Opening vaults on iOS can be remarkably slow.

Besides being slow, I found it buggy as hell. For instance, I wanted to log in with my Yubikey on my phone, and it flat out refused to let me in despite the master password and the PIN being 100% correct. There's even an open issue on Github about this, that they're doing absolutely nothing about, demonstrating the incompetence further at some really grand scales.

exactly this. and their autofill sucks so much on chrome desktop. It's bloated and slow. Even lastpass has a better and faster extension

Try to bring it up on bitwarden reddit sub, they will eat you alive

Slow as hell, it's like what happened to LastPass. Nobody gave a shit about UI/UX issues.

I mean, one of the most basic functionalities is missing: duplicate detection. This and the ability to just add a new domain to existing entry instead of a completely new one.

It's been requested for ages and they haven't delivered it yet.

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