Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>, I no longer recommend Bitwarden for normal people because the built-in password manager in Firefox is too good.

But a lot of "normal people" actually need a secrets manager which is larger in scope than just a "websites urls passwords manager". This means a password manager with extra metadata fields for users to add notes, associated email aliases, etc. E.g. if a website has an extra step of "Confirm your identity by answering this question : What was your childhood pet's name?", users want a place to save the answer ("BugsBunny") in the "notes" field of a password manager.) Another example would be the secret PIN unlock code for the spouse's phone. That's not a website url, it's just a "secret" that needs to be stored in an encrypted file.

Firefox password manager is too bare-bones with the only 2 fields being "Username" & "Password".

The better UI/UX for normal people is to have a unified app to store all their secrets instead of having some secrets in the Firefox password manager and other non-web-url secrets saved separately in yet another app.

I completely agree with you! Almost everyone needs to store more than only usernames and passwords for websites. Think of PIN for credit cards and the like.

This ^ passwords just don’t live in Firefox when you are using apps that need passwords across platforms (mac ios windows) and apps. This is where Bitwarden shines.

I don't know about iOS, but Firefox syncs my passwords between my Linux machine and Android phone just fine.

Your web passwords, not your app passwords.

AFAIK Firefox also doesn't store bank-account or creditcard details.

Here's why I recommend bitwarden to "my mom":

- It stores and fills in all your website passwords on your phone and on your laptop

- It makes it easy to generate new passwords for all these places

- It stores your PIN for your bank-accounts (in many EU country payments with PIN are the default)

- It stores your creditcard info and 3d passwords or other extra secrets it requires.

- It's the perfect place to store SSN, Tax IDs, "whats was the name of your first pet?" and so on.

I've never understood the rigid structure of e.g. Firefox or even lastpass, where they e.g. insist on having an URL or even insist on a username/password. I want secret notes with optional metadata - metadata that may follow a predefined structure (username, OTP secret, url, etc) but not always. Bitwarden does this much better IMO.

Bitwarden also stores authenticator keys for MFA and passkeys. The custom fields, notes section, and attachments are invaluable to me as well.

Absolutely, everyone I recommend BW to appreciates the notes feature as well - it's handy to have a place to jot down important things that aren't log-ins!

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