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How to prevent Firefox on Android from refreshing when switching to Bitwarden for the password? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've just switched from Brave to Firefox on Android and so far liking it. There's one issue though. I use Bitwarden for my credentials & SwiftKey as keyboard. When I go to a website that asks for credentials, the Bitwarden button shows up above my keyboard to unlock my vault, as expected. I click it, unlock with fingerprint, and select the credentials. So far it's as expected and the same as Brave. However, when I select a credential, it goes back to Firefox, but then refreshes the page; so the credentials are gone. Luckily the credentials then show up above my keyboard as I've unlocked the vault, but after some time of inactivity I have to unlock again and the problem reoccurs.

Any idea how to resolve this?

/edit: looks like a long outstanding bug in Firefox, see here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1807364

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is some explanation from firefox dev from two years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/md63k4/comment/gs8mo2t/

The answer is complicated.

Mobile operating systems don't have swap space. When running multiple apps, a mobile OS needs to be more aggressive at freeing memory than desktop operating systems do. They do this by terminating background processes. The OS uses various heuristics to decide which process(es) to kill.

The problem that you're seeing is not intentional on our part; there isn't something in Firefox that says, "unload everything whenever I go into the background." Instead, it is caused by the content processes being terminated by Android itself.

We know that Chromium-based browsers seem to be working better in this regard. We do not yet have a clear picture about what specifically is causing our content process to be a frequent target.

We're in the process of collecting additional telemetry to help us diagnose this. I've also landed a patch that helps to clean up content process memory usage when Android tells us that it needs memory, in the hope that it will reduce the likelihood of a content process termination. We're also testing Nightly with multiple content processes enabled, which may help.

At any rate, I wouldn't call this problem an intentional design decision, nor would I call it solved. We're doing what we can to learn more about it and get it fixed at some point.

Sounds to me android is by design letting chrome based browsers and killing everything else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I find it got a bit better when I cleaned Firefox's user data and cache. I still get it occasionally, but it's a lot less frequent now.

YMMV of course depending on phone specs, but it worked for me on my mediocre hardware (Moto G Power).