Not working with Vivaldi Browser on Android

anbugge

LastPass autofill doesn't work with my preferred browser on Android - Vivaldi Browser.

This apparently works in BitWarden, but not LastPass. The discussion in the Vivaldi forums point to LastPass to help add this: https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/408558

 

Any chance you could work with the Vivaldi devs to resolve this?

ianmacd

Apparently not; and given that Brave Beta still has the same issue after several years, I'm not expecting a fix any time soon.

This highlights one of the many downsides of reliance on proprietary software with closed code. Such reliance is something I have generally tried to avoid for the last 25 years, but at the time I decided on LastPass as our family's password management solution, it was essentially no contest, given our diverse set of requirements. The leading open source alternative at the time was a usability nightmare.

The password management landscape has changed in the last few years, however. Other providers have made great strides; and conversely, Logmein have rested on their laurels and allowed LastPass to languish. On Android in particular, where autofill failure used to be the exception rather than the rule, failure to fill fields in some app or other is now quite commonplace.

This steady decline in quality, combined with the inability to ever autofill web site passwords in Vivaldi on Android, has caused me to reassess our attachment to LastPass. Migrating to another password management system is a huge step for us — I can't think of any other piece of software on which we, six of us, rely so heavily — but at this point, I feel we have little choice.

The utility of LastPass is decreasing over time, other solutions are improving, and if the trend continues, the point will arrive — or may already have arrived — that it is no longer the best product for us to use.

With that thought in mind, I spent a few hours over the weekend installing Bitwarden and importing all of my personal LastPass data to it. This is a lot of data, somewhere in the region of 600 passwords and several dozen secure notes, some of which have attachments, multiple credit card entries and form fills. In addition, I make heavy use of 2FA, using both software and hardware tokens.

Any candidate replacement system is at a disadvantage to LastPass: It must possess an infallible import facility. How good LastPass's import might be is of no relevance to me. Well, Bitwarden passed the import test with flying colours.

And so far, the subsequent experience has been mostly positive. LastPass does a few things better than Bitwarden, but the latter also does quite a few things better than the former. Each has its idiosyncrasies, but nothing in Bitwarden has been a deal-breaker so far, and I have enough hours invested in it now to have delved into its many dimly lit nooks and crannies and satisfied myself that all major areas of usability are at least adequately covered.

In addition, Bitwarden is open source. As an illustration of a real-world benefit of this, I note that the GitHub issue that requested Vivaldi be added to the list of browsers supporting autofill was fulfilled and closed the same day that it was opened. That's compelling. In itself, it's not reason enough to consider such an invasive migration, but in combination with the other factors I've mentioned, it adds to the body of evidence suggesting that a switch might be in our best interests.

Our annual LastPass subscription auto-renewed a month ago, so I can afford to run LastPass and Bitwarden side by side for as long as I see value in so doing, but I can already see the scales tipping in favour of Bitwarden unless Logmein rapidly show a renewed commitment to their product.