After a recent update, the Bitwarden extension on Firefox is reportedly slowing the entire browser down.

The issues primarily affect version 2026.5.0, though some users report encountering problems from the previous 2026.4.0 release.

You can find complaints in the r/Bitwarden subreddit, detailing issues with browser slowdowns and freezes. After updating, many users have posted about unresponsive pages, particularly on Reddit and YouTube. There’s scrolling lag, CPU spikes, and a warning message from Firefox that reads “Bitwarden is slowing down this page.”

It’s not exclusive to one platform; the issue is persistent on Windows, Linux, and even macOS.

Notably, this isn’t an isolated incident. We’ve seen similar performance complaints before on older versions from 2025 and 2024.

Not every update triggers widespread issues, so it’s not going to affect everyone. I’ve personally checked on macOS, and adding the Bitwarden extension didn’t seem to affect the performance even with multiple YouTube and Reddit tabs.

If you’re facing trouble with the extension, you can try using the web version of Bitwarden as a temporary alternative. While some have suggested using the “Minimize memory usage” option on Firefox, this may not help since it’s the CPU that spikes due to the bug, and not the memory.

Fortunately, a Bitwarden employee has acknowledged the problem in Reddit comments. The issues have been forwarded to the relevant team.

Balancing security, convenience, and performance as Bitwarden grows more feature-rich is something the developers should look into. People are anticipating a new version that solves these problems, but it doesn’t help that the Firefox extension review process is much slower compared to other Chromium-based browsers.

In other Firefox news, Claude Mythos recently helped Mozilla patch security errors from over a decade ago. You can read about that here.

In an upcoming update, Firefox is planning to make it easier to detect when a website is using your location actively. We covered that here.

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