What were you doing: I closed the tab or the Chrome browser and then reopened the Bear Notes Web app.
What feature did you use: The login in Bear Notes Web.
What happened: Each time I reopen the website, I have to log in again with my password and the six-digit security code from Apple. Every time I close the tab or browser, I have to log in again.
What did you expect to happen: I expected my login session to persist after closing and reopening the tab or browser, at least for a reasonable duration, without requiring me to enter my credentials again. Is this normal during the beta phase?
Hi, yes this is by design. Itās because we decided to not store any user data in the browser, at least in this phase. This may change later, also based on your feedback.
Canāt confirm it. On my Windows 11 laptop with Vivaldi I donāt need to re-login even after booting the machine and over and over starting the browser again.
On my MacBook with Vivaldi I have to login each time after starting the browser.
Now that I actively closed the browser and tried again I had to relogin. Will watch the future behaviour.
Vivaldi
7.1.3570.54 (Stable channel) (64-Bit)
Ćberarbeitung
de12898bf4b653e5121862729b799c0b8e52a655
Betriebssystem
Windows 11 Version 23H2 (Build 22631.4890)
JavaScript
V8 13.2.152.41
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Thatās pretty scary. It means Vivaldi is not clearing the SessionStorage when a tab is closedā¦ unless maybe the browser as a whole was closed and itās set to restore the previous session?
I have Windows 11 configured to go to sleep and to start it again if I open. Usually the browser is closed after that. At least once I was already logged in.
Thank you for your response. I completely understand that Bear doesnāt want to store user data in the browser. We users are never really satisfied anyway ā We scream, āPrivacy first! Keep your hands off my data!ā but at the same time, we expect to click a link and be logged in instantly, just like Gmail, iCloud, Dropbox, etc.
My current issue is that when I quickly need to read a note, I prefer grabbing my phone because I can open Bear right away, search, and find my note in less than 10 seconds. If I have to log into Bear Web, enter my username and password, wait for the six-digit security code, and enter that as well, it takes too long (about a minute) just to check a note briefly. One minute may not sound like much, but in āI-just-want-to-check-this-real-quickā time, it feels like an eternity.
Of course, I will now try to keep Bear Web open in a separate browser window all day so that I stay logged in. But maybe there could be an option during login where users can choose whether they want Bear to store their login data (so they stay logged in) or not. That way, each user can decide how their data is handled and everyone gets what they want - could this be an option?
If I Quit Edge without closing web.bear.app tab, I can restart Edge without new login to web.bear.app. I can even reboot my MacBook Pro and restart Edge with āweb.bear.appā active (it only briefly āverifies invitation ticketā)
It even works when I change country with VPN in between.
Tested quite quickly, so have not been able to check for any timeout yet, though.
Yes, that setting will (forgive the oversimplification) store a snapshot of the current browser state (i.e. tabs and their session storages) to disk, so the next time the application starts it will pick up from where it left, regardless of reboots or VPN settings.
After discussing this with the team, weāre probably going to change the Bear Web behaviour to avoid that, because it could be undesirable to users who are particularly sensitive to privacy. If and when we do that, however, we will be adding a setting to ātrust this browserā which will let the user signal they want their session to survive when the tab is closed (everytime, not just when the browser as a whole is killed).
I tested the same on Edge in Windows, and there closing the app will force new login.
But it seems that rebooting Windows with web.bear.app in Edge active (without first closing Edge), will allow for restart of Edge with web.bear.app still logged in.
Experimented with making web.bear.app a separate app with Edge, and that seemed quite sweet:
It separated Edge browser from web.bear.app, so easiear to keep Bear active without accidentally closing it while Edge is used for other browsing.
And this separate Edge web.bear.app did not keep login-state after windows reboot.
Would be great if there is a way to re-use existing iCloud logins. Every-time I need to login to Bear, I need to provide my iCloud username and password even though, Iām already logged-in.
This could be because the login screen is opened in a separate popup with no context. Would be nice if it was possible to skip this based on existing authentication.
Hi Bear team, the āTrust this deviceā toggle doesnāt seem to work for me. Even though I check the toggle, every time I close the tab ā or even just refresh the page ā Bear Web still asks me to connect to iCloud, and I have to enter my username, password, and 6-digit code again and again. I understand the privacy considerations, but itās still frustrating when I just need to jot down a quick note. It might have worked differently in the past, but since the āTrust this deviceā option is still available now, Iām wondering whether itās not working for everyone or just not working for me ā and how I can fix it.
Hi Bru, I noticed that the issues seem to have been fixed in version 0.24, released on 2025-10-30 (at least for me). Itās been working perfectly so far. Thank you, Bear team!
Hey, thatās great news! I was waiting a bit before pinging you on the thread, just to be sure, but weāre very happy that the update actually fixed it for you! Happy note taking!
this would be awesome