Electron 1Password 8 Beta: how’s it feel?
How are people liking the electron 1password 8 beta? I’ve had generally negative opinions of electron since the whole thing started. Especially from a Mac perspective.
The electron apps I’ve used from other devs all felt “off” from a Mac perspective. Didn’t feel very Mac-like.
I get the benefit, which is reduced development hours for cross platform apps. I just doubt this will result in 1password reducing their cost. So the benefit is retained solely by the company in the form of increased profits. Unless they were on the verge of a price increase, and this helped prevent an increase.
In my mind a Mac developer switching to electron is marginally diminishing the user experience for a significant reduction in development cost. Whether that cost savings is passed down to the consumer to compensate them for reducing their user experience is up to each company.
And how much the experience reduction is, is also up to each company. So for those of you on the beta, how much worse is it than a native Mac app? Just a little? A medium amount? A lot?
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
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Hey @brank, thanks for bringing up this conversation. I'm obviously biased when it comes to this topic since I work at 1Password, but I'll share my two cents anyway. I joined the company right around the time we started building 1Password 8, and it has made us incredibly quick at building and releasing new features. When Early Access came out, we knowingly put out a version of the application that's was incomplete (i.e. missing some features that we plan to have in time for the final release), and I'm sure that along with the switch to Electron that might have given some people an impression that we'd de-prioritized our users, although we really haven't.
The thing is, these things take a lot of time and feedback to get right. The feedback we've received from the community in the last few months has done wonders in helping us chart the right course, and the speed at which we can develop now means we have a chance to address it much quicker than before.
In terms of costs, I would urge you to consider the other side of the equation: the gains in efficiency have many ways to trickle down to our users, not just pricing. One of those is the ability to add new features and to make the whole 1Password experience safer, quicker and easier to use. That adds value too, just on the other side of the equation :)
These are just my thoughts, and I'm very curious what others think about this topic.
Gabriele
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1p8 is and always will be junk. I used 1p8 for 30 days and just gave up. It's awful in little ways that make it hard to explain. Try using it and after a few weeks you think it's alright I guess. Switch back to 1p7 and you immediately notice so many little things. The dropdowns not able to resize past the window. Quick access being its own separate app which means its placement on multi monitor setups is clunky at best. The framerate on the list view is awful.
Honestly some of us have canceled our subscriptions and aren't renewing, I'm one of them. Try 1p8 and form your own opinions.
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Hi Gabriele,
"In terms of costs, I would urge you to consider the other side of the equation: the gains in efficiency have many ways to trickle down to our users, not just pricing. One of those is the ability to add new features"
You bring up an interesting point that I intentionally skipped because I didn't want to bash AgileBits but since you brought it up, can you please describe the new features that you added to 1Password over the last 5 to 8 years?
Since I started using 1Password, around version 5 or 6, I have only noticed a single new feature I found worthwhile. The One Time password function.
Over the years, this has been my experience with new "features" to 1Password:
There was a new "feature" that caused the credit card CCV 3-digit security codes to be astrisked *** out by default and required clicking on them to reveal. Since I use 1Password at home with no one looking over my shoulder, this was a massive downgrade because I was not at risk of someone seeing the numbers and I had to manually click each time to view them. Ultimately, I went through the trouble of going through my 30-ish credit cards (I have a lot for business accounts and different travel/rewards programs) and changed all 30-ish entries to have custom fields for CCV that were plain text and manually updated each record.
Then there was the new feature that scanned all of your passwords and websites and matched against breached records. Which again was a downgrade that I had to figure out how to disable, because I find it to be a security concern for 1Password to maintain hashed values of my passwords and a list of every website I have an account to. It was a minor security concern back when I had a standalone license, and now with cloud-only subscription model, it's a much larger concern since now it's all tied to my real identity.
It's really quite a silly feature since people need to change their passwords on a regular basis anyway, whether or not 1Password identified it in a breach. Because 1Password can't possibly know all passwords that have been breached and lack of this alert might cause complacency in the end user to maintain old passwords. So this was another downgrade that I had to go into settings to disable.
Then you took away my ability to use Safari Extensions with my standalone license about 2 years ago.
Now you took away share sheets in iOS.
Soon you'll take away local vaults and DropBox support.
So the innovation seems to be working in the backwards direction and I'd prefer if the developers had less time to remove good features and less time to add new features that are a hassle to disable.
I don't mean this in a bashing way, although I know it comes across as such. Can you tell me what new features 1Password has added in the last 5 to 8 years that are an actual improvement to the user? I haven't been following your blogs over the last 5 to 8 years and admittently only pay attention when yet another feature has been removed or a new feature has been added that I need to figure out how to disable.
The One Time passwords thing was fantastic and I loved that! So what new features have been added over the years that I can consider and applaud you for and wish for more of that going forward?
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A senseless ‚discussion‘. Nothing will change, we won’t see a 1Pwd 8 which will be different to this what we see now.
You can dig a little bit deeper in this forum, many post from users not happy about these changes. But Agile always tries to explain again and again how much better and great and blabla the new beta is. And all features are better … I had the feeling that they do this mainly to whitewash their product - knowing that it goes to the wrong direction. Just the aspect that they developed first v8 for Linux and Windows and THEN for Mac. Of course they knew that most of the Mac users won’t be happy with v8. But it was easier to say, that the development is almost done, more than one year, and “we got good feedback for the Win and Linux version”. I got really upset about this arrogance by just reading how great v8 is, without trying to understand the users.
They started with designing a new product and all they might have learned during the last years was thrown in the trash or forgotten, Just to read the hints and recommendations in the comments from many users telling that Agile makeed and still makes mistakes on a very, very low level, beginners mistakes. Look at the GUI …Of course it is their product, AgileBits decides what they have to do, But I (and many other users) decide to leave 1Pwd soon, after using it from also most the beginning,
Sad but that’s how it is …
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@brank lots to unpack in your question, but I'll do my best :)
You bring up an interesting point that I intentionally skipped because I didn't want to bash AgileBits but since you brought it up, can you please describe the new features that you added to 1Password over the last 5 to 8 years?
Since I started using 1Password, around version 5 or 6, I have only noticed a single new feature I found worthwhile. The One Time password function.
A few caveats first. I've been a 1Password user since 2014 but I started at the company only in January 2020. That's when 1Password 8 began serious development. Over the last year and a half we spent a lot of time catching up to 1Password 7's feature set, since this a rewrite from the ground up. We're still doing some of that, but I've also recently seen us accelerate the pace at which we build completely new stuff that wasn't there before. I was caught by surprise this morning when I read Dave's announcement of 1Password 8.3 with the new Item Sharing feature. I just didn't expect that to come out so quickly, from an internal perspective the development happened in the blink of an eye :)
The other things I can mention off the top of my head are Quick Access, which is a major reinvention of how we provide quick filling on desktop, as well as Watchtower (which is in itself still rapidly evolving and you'll see it improve over the upcoming releases). Collections are another major version 8 feature which allows you to organize your vaults in ways that you could not before. Search has received a very important overhaul that took us months to plan and is in itself going to keep evolving and improving. Item editing has also received its biggest redesign in years on our desktop apps. It's now much easier to use, and requires way less work when it comes to adding fields to your items or editing existing ones, thanks to how it suggests existing usernames or the much more advanced and usable password generator. Plus, due to it being built with React, we've been able to integrate a lot of those improvement into our browser extension, too.
I wish I could talk about all the other features that are coming but all I can say for now is there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff to play with soon :)
Over the years, this has been my experience with new "features" to 1Password:
There was a new "feature" that caused the credit card CCV 3-digit security codes to be astrisked *** out by default and required clicking on them to reveal. Since I use 1Password at home with no one looking over my shoulder, this was a massive downgrade because I was not at risk of someone seeing the numbers and I had to manually click each time to view them. Ultimately, I went through the trouble of going through my 30-ish credit cards (I have a lot for business accounts and different travel/rewards programs) and changed all 30-ish entries to have custom fields for CCV that were plain text and manually updated each record.
I can definitely see the difficulty with that. I know you've already gone through the trouble of changing all the fields, but I'll just mention that 1Password 8 allows you to press Cmd+R (or Ctrl+R on Linux/Windows) to toggle the display of concealed fields temporarily. In 1Password 7 you could do the same by holding Alt or Option. In 1Password 8 we also have a setting that allows you to always display all concealed fields in plain text.
Either way, feedback like this is something we're always listening to. We've been tracking this type of request and we're getting better at sorting through them and making improvements based on what our users are telling us about their experience.
Then there was the new feature that scanned all of your passwords and websites and matched against breached records. Which again was a downgrade that I had to figure out how to disable, because I find it to be a security concern for 1Password to maintain hashed values of my passwords and a list of every website I have an account to. It was a minor security concern back when I had a standalone license, and now with cloud-only subscription model, it's a much larger concern since now it's all tied to my real identity.
I want to clarify a potential misconception here: with Watchtower, none of your passwords ever leave your device or your encrypted vaults, even when you're using a cloud subscription. We have absolutely no access to your data. Watchtower processing happens locally, meaning that the work of comparing your passwords and logins to what's been breached never happens anywhere other than on the device that's running your 1Password client.
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