Everyone needs a password manager – and these days they’re ten-a-penny, offering most of the core functionality you need from easy secure password management and generation to integration into your browser and ability to sync across multiple devices.
- Not even the team at Bitwarden can read your data, even if we wanted to. Your data is sealed with AES-256 bit encryption, salted hashing, and PBKDF2 SHA-256. Bitwarden is 100% open source software. The source code for Bitwarden is hosted on GitHub and everyone is free to review, audit, and contribute to the Bitwarden codebase.
- Bitwarden offers a tempting free plan and substantially cheaper subscriptions, but 1Password has a cleaner design and additional features like password recovery, a Chrome OS app, and 24/7 support.
Safari Bitwarden Extension
What makes Bitwarden worthy of your attention then? For us, the fact it’s open-source is a major attraction. That means its code is transparent and easily accessible, but the company also uses professional auditors to reveal weaknesses for it to fix. There are paid solutions for both families (just $1/month) and businesses to help fund it, but ultimately all the major functionality is completely free.
Bitwarden, the open source password manager, makes it easy to generate and store unique passwords for any browser or device. Create your free account on the platform with end-to-end encryption and flexible integration options for you or your business.
It works across a wide range of devices and platforms. The link above will install the universal app version of Bitwarden, which allows you to browse, manage and easily copy your login information to the clipboard for pasting into other apps including your browser. You can also access your vault online through the web vault – typically when on a shared computer, but as always be careful about how secure that computer is before trusting it.
To simplify browser logins, however, we recommend you install one of the many available browser add-ons, currently available for all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera.
Crucially, Bitwarden seems to have the security aspects right too: your vault is synced between devices over the cloud, but using end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption that deliberately prevents Bitwarden or anyone who tried to compel it to open up your vault. You can also enable 2FA for additional security.
In use, Bitwarden is simple enough to use – the browser add-ons help simplify the process of adding existing items to your vault, but a minor criticism is that you can’t easily link generated passwords to the account you’ve just created – either you must create the login manually, or log out and back in before Bitwarden offers to save it for you. But it’s a minor blemish on a password manager that should be enjoying much greater popularity than it currently does.
Note that this is the portable version of Bitwarden.
Verdict:
If you’re looking for a password manager – or unhappy with your current offering – then Bitwarden is our recommended choice.
Bitwarden Safari extension no longer works with the Bitwarden direct download application
Today I needed to login into a website so I opened Safari and went to open the Bitwarden extension and to my surprise, it wasn’t there. WTF!
Bitwarden Safari 13
Here is whats up: “Due to changes by Apple, Safari limits Web Extension use to only those obtained through Mac App Store downloads. As of the 2021-03-11 Release, users will not be able to use a Bitwarden Safari Extension obtained through a .dmg installation from bitwarden.com/download or any other non-App Store source. ”Safari Web Extension | Bitwarden Help & Support
According to Bitwarden Support Release Notes the Safari App Extension has officially been ported to a Web Extension for use with Safari 14 . Due to changes to Safari, Web Extension use is now limited to only those obtained through Mac App Store download. Release Notes | Bitwarden Help & Support
Safari Bitwarden
I unistalled the download version of Bitwarden and installed the Mac App Store version and all is good. A little advance notice on this issue would have been nice.