When I installed the Bitwarden flatpak, everything seemed to be working fine. However, when I wanted to enable biometric authentication in the browser extention (which requires communication between the browser extension and desktop application), an error message popped up.
The error message said I needed to enable browser integration in the desktop application. I had the setting configured properly, so it had to be an issue with the flatpak.
I was using the extension on the natively installed Firefox, so I tried getting the flatpak of Firefox instead – still no cigar. However, when I installed Bitwarden via the native repositories (I’m on Manjaro FYI), the integration communicated successfully.
Tl;dr – the Bitwarden flatpak can’t talk to browser extensions.
Some communication channel must not be working. According to this post, it must be possible for a flatpak’d password manager to talk to its broswer extension in a natively installed browser (the post proposes some odd workaround for using a flatpak’d broswer, but assumes the native broswer is already working).
Does this sound like an issue with Bitwarden, or something that could be fixed on the Flathub end?
If this is something the Bitwarden devs would need to fix, I can go post about it on their forum. But trying here first.
I’ll probably have to use the native application until this gets fixed.