1PW8 - Initial Impressions and Feedback
I've been giving the 1PW 8 Early Access a spin and … boy this is rough.
- The information density is extremely low (as discussed in other threads). There is too much space and far more scrolling is required to find stuff. I feel like I'm fighting the app to simply find information.
- So much muscle memory has been broken, and I don't understand why. ⌘\ to show the autofill window was the 1Password shortcut (didn't you even have shirts about it at one point?) and now it's gone. Please put it back
- I can't temporarily reveal passwords by holding down the option key. I used this all the time as a way to quickly remind myself what a password was
- The Safari Extension should be communicating with the app to sign in, not make me sign in separately (when it lets me sign in at all)
- Vault editing is … entirely missing? I can't rename vaults, see the sharing configuration, change icons… I've been double clicking on the vault in the sidebar, right clicking, digging in preferences…
- Clicking the "New Vault" plus button does something approximately 1 time in 20. Most of the time it's non-functional. I'm also curious why this workflow is so privileged in the UI. Is creating a new vault such a common occurrence that there needs to be an always-visible button in the sidebar?
- The search bar in the titlebar is always scoped to the entire account, and not the thing that's actually selected. UX suggests that a search bar that's aligned with a selected item should be scoped to the selected item. IOW, a search bar in the sidebar would search everything, but a search bar over a list of items should search the list of items.
- The "click a link to see watchtower details" UX is very browser-y and does not feel appropriate for a Mac App. Watchtower should be a group in the sidebar at the same level as "Vaults"
- I should be able to drag-and-drop to rearrange "Vaults", "Tags", etc in the sidebar
- I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to make the vault groups I saw referenced somewhere. I was expecting a + button in the sidebar to help with this, or a right-click/contextual menu on a vault. I eventually figured out these are "collections" and buried in a menu.
- The overall lack of any contextual actions in the sidebar is a major UX hinderance.
- This app is an enormous resource hog. It's spun up 4 different processes just to run the app and is using hundreds of megabytes of active memory and dozens of threads (62 right now; it was 49 earlier). This is grossly inefficient. Mail.app, which is a far more complicated app, is barely using 100MB of memory and 9 threads. 1Password should not be consuming an order of magnitude more system resources than Mail.
Overall, this release is a step backwards. I hope that most of these issues are simply because you haven't gotten to them yet, but I'm having a hard time excusing the enormous amount of system resources this app is consuming. My day-to-day machine is a laptop and there is no excuse for an app like this to make my fans spin up.
1Password Version: 8
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: macOS 12
Comments
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A couple more things:
- I really miss 1Password Mini. I liked being able to see the normal item UI in the popup window. It was familiar and matched the app. The new faux-spotlight popup is a huge change and doesn't show me the information I want to see
- ⌘O in the faux-spotlight popup opens the wrong item.
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Immediately ran into most of the things you've mentioned too. Indeed it's still very rough, and I will be switching back to 1P7 because of that.
One more thing not mentioned in this list:
Dates do not adhere to the locale of the Mac. It shows US date notation instead of European date notation (system is set to US English, but the date notation in the system is not US English).0 -
+100 to everything davedelong said, including for 1Password Mini. +1000 for ⌘-\ autofill shortcut.
Things I strongly dislike:
- There is so much delay afte r clicking the 1Password Safari extension now, it's frustrating.
Clicking the giant + button > Login opens a new tab to 1Password.com to create an item there.
- 1Password.com has far fewer options to customize the password.
Icons and list items and the entire UI pop in at different times in a jarring fashion when opening 1PW8, scrolling, or clicking on different items in the sidebar.
- Using Watchtower and clicking on any "Show items" removes focus from the Watchtower entry in the sidebar. There's no way to "go back" from the list to the Watchtower summary aside from clicking the sidebar item again.
- No way to set what Vault I see when I open 1PW8
No obvious way to filter results by Vault when I'm searching or after I've searched
- Searching and then clicking on the Vault in the sidebar doesn't filter.
- No tokenizing or the ability to include multiple search terms, like vault name with a site name.
The popover search UI is far too compact and terse. So much context is missing it makes it only a step above useless.
Search should default to searching everything with options to filter, instead of defaulting to filtering heavily with an option to show me everything.
- If you must, promote certain exact matching things like tags to the top of the results to help me get there faster, but show me everything.
Dragging an item in the list puts the dragged item UI affordance off to the side and below my cursor. Makes it feel like I started dragging the wrong item or the app doesn't know exactly where I'm clicking, either way reducing my confidence in the app.
- Password history took far too long to find. Needs to be in a much more obvious and accessible place.
I could go on, but I have to get back to work. Overall, it just feels like I'm using a web app which is 100% not what I expect from 1Password. I've been using 1Password for over a decade and being a native Mac app was a differentiating factor and primary selling point, the user experience being pleasant and a fantastic Mac citizen. This is such a huge regression that if there was another native alternative with family sharing features, I'd switch in an instant. Sadly, one no longer exists.
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Only had it for a couple of hours but the first thing that struck me on opening it was the space, just way too much, particularly before and after the alphabet letters. Also the look isn't right.. OK, it's such a big change that everyone will probably like it in the end, as was the uproar with Skype, but changing command keys again - is that really necessary when we've all got muscle memory. Highly tempted to go back to 7.
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Used it for a bit. Feels like I downgraded to bitwarden or something. The in-your-face electron UI really makes this whole app seem less polished. My problems so far:
The UI looks generally out of place on the Mac, wrong sized fonts, it's not using the system renderer, buttons, dialogs look like a web app. It looks fine in screenshots, it looks bad in use. I fell like I'm using ms Teams, and not an app I actually like or care to use.
Why can't I change keyboard shortcuts? I already had assigned shift+cmd+space to other stuff.
The mini 1p search was so much better before. Now it looks unpolished and really out of place. The UI change from search to actually selecting items is jarring. Why can't I go back after I've selected an item? Why does the UI stay there when I click copy? Why does it stay when I click outside of it? Why doesn't it reappear at the same place it was when I closed it? Why do I have to have the dumb menubar icon to be able to use quick search at all? Also, if I select any item at all the whole 1password app gets brought to the front, if there's an open window in the background.Why is there no real integration between the safari extension and the app?
Why does it let me do this? Or this? Why doesn't it just follow system font sizes and scaling?
On the positive side, when I heard that the app was getting rewritten in electron, my first fear was that it wouldn't get excluded from clipboard managers, like other electron password managers, but I'm happy to see it does.
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I have to agree with most of the things said here. The App looks pretty and performs well, but the browser extension for Safari is atrocious.
The App feels plenty fast, but it has created so many threads, more than the old 1P7 seemed to? I suspect its due to the Electron framework being used (sigh) but yes it seems the focus has been entirely on cross-platforming, rather than just focusing on building the best possible macOS App.
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Hi, @davedelong. Thanks for the detailed feedback!
⌘\ to show the autofill window was the 1Password shortcut (didn't you even have shirts about it at one point?) and now it's gone. Please put it back
We did (I do) have shirts about it, and we did put it back. :) Still need to wire up the part to show the menu if there is more than one option.
I can't temporarily reveal passwords by holding down the option key.
I haven't seen this as much, but it's a valid concern. We've heard a bit from folks that were startled by their password showing up when they didn't want it to, but perhaps it could come back behind a preference.
The Safari Extension should be communicating with the app to sign in
Hmm, this should be working. You may need to turn on browser integration? If that's not it let us know.
Vault editing is … entirely missing?
Yep, that's not implemented yet.
Clicking the "New Vault" plus button does something approximately 1 time in 20. Most of the time it's non-functional.
Huh. I can't replicate this bug. Is it still happening for you?
I'm also curious why this workflow is so privileged in the UI. Is creating a new vault such a common occurrence that there needs to be an always-visible button in the sidebar?
I've not heard that one before. It seems like a great place for it to me.
The search bar in the titlebar is always scoped to the entire account, and not the thing that's actually selected. UX suggests that a search bar that's aligned with a selected item should be scoped to the selected item. IOW, a search bar in the sidebar would search everything, but a search bar over a list of items should search the list of items.
Hmm, I can see that, though it hasn't been a problem for me personally. FWIW, if you create a vault collection and select it, that does narrow the search. I checked and we have an open issue for this with no disagreement so it will probably be adjusted in the future.
ref: dev/core/core#8745
The "click a link to see watchtower details" UX is very browser-y and does not feel appropriate for a Mac App. Watchtower should be a group in the sidebar at the same level as "Vaults"
Good point. I like the overall report view, but the linky-ness would be an easy tweak. I've passed that on to the team.
ref: dev/core/core#9518
I should be able to drag-and-drop to rearrange "Vaults", "Tags", etc in the sidebar
This wasn't possible in version 7 either. I don't have a strong opinion either way, but you can at least collapse the sections if you need to.
I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to make the vault groups I saw referenced somewhere. I was expecting a + button in the sidebar to help with this, or a right-click/contextual menu on a vault. I eventually figured out these are "collections" and buried in a menu.
I'm sorry this wasn't intuitive. I agree we could probably surface this feature better. It's one of my favorites and I want everyone to find it. :)
The overall lack of any contextual actions in the sidebar is a major UX hinderance.
I think we'll get better there.
This app is an enormous resource hog.
I was doing some testing on this earlier. 1Password 7 was using about 160 MB of memory and 1Password 8 around 190. I haven't noticed any performance issues on my laptop in my day to day usage, but we've definitely heard some extreme reports and we're looking into those. I'm not sure I follow why you think Mail.app is far more complicated than 1Password, though. Perhaps it is, but I see their functionality as very similar: lots of items organized in collections with syncing, creating, and rendering. Plus, 1Password data is encrypted at rest.
I really miss 1Password Mini. I liked being able to see the normal item UI in the popup window.
I liked this too. I'm honestly not completely sure what the final version will look like, but I do know the new Quick Access is very new and we've got plenty to tweak there still.
⌘O in the faux-spotlight popup opens the wrong item.
Huh, that's not good. I wasn't able to replicate this myself, but it could have been fixed in the last week. Do you still see this?
Phew. That was a lot of great feedback. Thank you. I think most of it was stuff we have fixed or will fix, but this is why we have the early access, so thanks for giving it a spin!
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Dates do not adhere to the locale of the Mac. It shows US date notation instead of European date notation (system is set to US English, but the date notation in the system is not US English).
@Arnoud you are correct. I've double checked that we have an issue filed for this. 👍
ref: dev/core/core#8747
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@Solowalker thanks for that list too. I think a bunch of those are polish things that we'll be getting too, and some of them I addressed in a previous response.
No way to set what Vault I see when I open 1PW8
1Password 8 remembers the last collection and vault you had selected. While that's not exactly the same thing, it seems to work well for most folks.
No tokenizing or the ability to include multiple search terms, like vault name with a site name.
We certainly tokenize, but you're right you can't search for a combination of vault and item. That's an interesting idea, though. If you were able to properly search within a vault, would you still want this?
The popover search UI is far too compact and terse.
I find that to be true sometimes, but if you hit Cmd-Return you can see the full search results and that works for me.
Search should default to searching everything with options to filter, instead of defaulting to filtering heavily with an option to show me everything.
If you must, promote certain exact matching things like tags to the top of the results to help me get there faster, but show me everything.Can you clarify what you mean here? We search the currently selected account or collection by default, but other than that there's no filtering applied by default.
If you're referring to the difference between the quick search results and the "Show all matching items", this is a performance optimization. We avoid searching inside item details by default because items are encrypted at rest, so it would slow search down a lot if we had to decrypt every item in the account and search its full text on every keypress.
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Why can't I change keyboard shortcuts?
I think this will be coming.
The mini 1p search was so much better before. Now it looks unpolished and really out of place.
It's very new, but the feedback is helpful as we continue to tune it, thanks!
Why is there no real integration between the safari extension and the app?
This should be working. See my first comment above.
Why does it let me do this? Or this? Why doesn't it just follow system font sizes and scaling?
Can you explain what the problem is with allowing the user to zoom in and out? Some folks like smaller or larger UIs for different apps, so it's great for accessibility. I do see an issue where at very small sizes the content starts to overlap with the window controls, so we should probably fix that at least.
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I’m also not a fan of vault selection and creation being promoted so much compared to v7. Perhaps my usage is different than the norm, but I change categories multiple times a day, whereas I might change vaults once or twice a week. Electron aside, this is my least-favorite aspect of the UI.
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I would take the comment of @tiltowaitt one step further — pretty much everything in the sidebar now (vaults, tags, accounts) is stuff I almost never access, so that’s now a dead zone for me. Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I pretty much do a universal search, or click into a category. So the one thing I access multiple times a day — categories — is the one thing that’s harder to get too. Would love to see it go to the sidebar, either as an option or in addition to what is there.
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@cyberskier I’m actually in the same boat, come to think. I have maybe 30 items tagged, but only because I consciously made the effort to do so. I just don’t find them particularly useful. So yes, for me the sidebar is also mostly wasted space.
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Can you explain what the problem is with allowing the user to zoom in and out? Some folks like smaller or larger UIs for different apps, so it's great for accessibility. I do see an issue where at very small sizes the content starts to overlap with the window controls, so we should probably fix that at least.
The problem is that there aren’t upper and lower zoom limits. It is not really great for accessibility, as it can be really easily changed by mistake (if this is kept in the final release, I’d say you have to expect lots of calls and emails to customer service because the UI suddenly became really big or really small), and it is reset after the app is quit. The default UI size is different from the default OS’ UI size, and the sidebar does not follow OS’ size preferences.
This is a feature that shouldn’t be a quickly accessible keyboard shortcut, but should be a preference under settings. Changing app size at every launch, with keyboard shortcuts as if 1p was a browser window, is a janky and unpolished experience in the end.0 -
Thanks for the additional feedback folks. Regarding the category selector, I actually use that less often than I switch vaults, but I do both of those much less often than I search and switch account/collection, so yeah, different folks have different usage patterns. We made a design decision to emphasize vaults over categories, and we'll continue to collect feedback on that.
Edit: I forgot to mention, categories now also appear in quick search results, so if you default to searching, that could be useful.
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Chrome Extension
- in general, is a step back
- you can feel loading lag each time you click the extension
- The fonts, search, paddings are just too big
- The item title font is so big often I see (...)
- Not enough space to see the item fields, I have to scroll all the time
- When I search everything blinks and jumps
- raindrop.io is a good example of how the WP8 UI should be balanced and work
Mac App
- As for the Electron app, this is not bad in terms of look and feel however this is not the original smooth experience I picked 1PW in the first place 8 years ago.
- I lost the categories panel which was very useful and the dropdown is terrible
- The search experience is different in the extension and in the app now. In the app, the search result is displayed in the dropdown however in the extension, the search result is the list. In the app, you are doubling up the lists and accommodating the result in the smaller space it's very hard to see what has been found plus I have to maintain two list contexts if I jump from the search to browse the result list easily.
- Unable to preview attachments without downloading them?
- again raindrop.io do a bit better job in hiding the web on desktop approach
I do like the UI of the Mac App more than I thought but it feels slower and rough, you could add some CSS animations to soft things a little bit. I think the extension needs more UI review. As for me, I will hold on to the WP7 for now.
Thanks
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