New Chrome Could Not Log In to Bitwarden, but Old Machines Still Worked: A Vaultwarden Compatibility Trap

Mon, 18 May 2026 10:05:00 +0800

TL;DR

The failure looked like a Chrome or Bitwarden extension problem: newly installed computers could not log in to a self-hosted Vaultwarden instance, while existing computers continued to work with the same Bitwarden 2026.4.1 browser extension. The actual root cause was server-side compatibility: the clients were using a newer prelogin endpoint, while the Vaultwarden server was still running vaultwarden/server:1.35.4-alpine, which did not provide /identity/accounts/prelogin/password.

Existing machines were likely protected by an already established login state and local cache. They did not prove that the full first-login API path was still compatible. The correct fix was to back up the Vaultwarden data, upgrade the server image to 1.36.0 or newer, and confirm from logs that the prelogin endpoint no longer returned 404.

All domains, paths, usernames, and deployment details in this article are sanitized. Examples use placeholders such as vault.example.com and /opt/vaultwarden; no internal network or private information is included.

Deploy Your Own Bitwarden Password Management Server

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 20:20:06 +0800

Many people are not comfortable storing their passwords online with services like LastPass. Even though the official claim is that passwords are encrypted and the server cannot see user passwords, some still feel uneasy. In that case, you can deploy the open-source Bitwarden to set up your own password management server.

Prerequisites: A VPS server and a domain name with the IP address already resolved to the server.

Bitwarden on Margrop Blog

New Chrome Could Not Log In to Bitwarden, but Old Machines Still Worked: A Vaultwarden Compatibility Trap

Deploy Your Own Bitwarden Password Management Server