1Password 8 for Mac Pre-release Feedback
Below is my feedback on 1P8 since I have started using it full time about a month ago. I have been compiling my thoughts on it in order to create one large feedback post. I installed an update today and some things have changed/improved. I decided that I would keep my original thoughts and post any relevant updates. I figured that this may help others.
While I was at it, I sprinkled in a few ideas and issues that are not 1P8 specific.
For reference, I am running a 2016 MacBookPro with TouchBar (yes, I like the TouchBar) with MacOS 12.0.1. Probably irrelevant but I also have a BlackMagic external GPU and dual LG 5K displays.
Electron
Electron or not to Electron, I could not really give a hoot! ;-)
As long as 1Password works and remains as awesome as Dave, Roustem and team have been making for years, I really don't care about the underlying tech. I am sure that having a bulk of the app in Rust makes it cross platform and 1000% more efficient. They sprinkle in a little Swift and Obj-C to give me the OS integrations that we need. 1P has had its own design language for many years now as well. 1P8 looks beautiful. Let haters hate... keep up the good work guys!
Safari Extension
Having separate App and Safari extension feels like a step backwards. I thought that Apps could ship with the extensions built in. Having the extension shipped with the App makes the installation and setup experience so much more user friendly, especially for non-technical users.
Accounts
Inside 1Password 8, it says that my account has been frozen. It does not allow me to do anything inside of the app. I still have full control in the iPhone app though.
UPDATE: OK. I think I may have figured this out. On my Mac, I have 2 accounts logged in: My family account and what I assume is my private legacy account since I've been a 1P user for so long.
I am not sure why this was not an issue in 1P7. Only the logins that are from my legacy Private account are showing the frozen message. I guess I need to make sure that everything from the old account is inside of the new account. Then I need to figure out how to delete that older account and all of its data.
Account Setup
It seems odd that the accounts are not setup in the preferences. Seems like a logical place to have them.
What happened to ⌘\?!?
The behavior of ⌘\ has changed in 1P8. This one actually makes me pretty frustrated. It is probably my top gripe with the new version. This is like Apple changing ⌘C. Please bring its old behavior back.
I used ⌘\ countless times everyday to launch 1Password from anywhere, not just browsers. Its really messing with my muscle memory.
I see the keyboard prefs and ⌘\ is there for Fill in Browser but I cannot also have it for Show 1Password. Maybe I need to find a new workflow but having this behavior change has made the migration more difficult. Maybe changing ⌘\ to launch quick access makes the most sense. Most of the time, I don't even need that shortcut when inside of the browser since 1P auto-shows.
Unlocking + Autofill Performance
Performance with unlocking 1P8 and autofilling a password has not been great. When I unlock 1P8, the extension takes a while to show the suggested logins. Sometimes I would refresh the page in order to give it a kick.
UPDATE: Today's update seems to drastically improve this. Thank God for that.
Touch ID and AppleWatch
In order to use TouchID/Watch to unlock, I need to click on the button on the 1P8 Lock Screen. Previously, I would be automatically prompted. I prefer that because I then don't need to move my hands to the trackpad to move the mouse.
UPDATE: This seems to be fixed in the latest version.
Reveal Password
When you are viewing a login, you used to be able to hold down the option key in order to reveal the password temporarily. This is no longer possible. I used this feature a lot.
Search
The new search is different. I did not like it at first but have gotten used to it. I get what you guys are going for. Thank you for adding ⌘return to give the old functionality back.
However, If I am in a category and then search I would expect that it would only search the category that I am in. Instead it searches All Items. I do notice that if I am in a category then use ⌘F, it does filter by the view that I am in.
Duplicates
I have a TON of duplicates after updating to 1P8. It looks like all of the duplicates have a tag from an old 1P6 import. I am not sure the best plan of attack to fix this.
UPDATE: I figured out that this was apart of my 2 accounts that were logged in. See above. It is odd that I never had this in 1P7.
Categories
Having the categories removed from the sidebar has been a little tough to adjust to.
Feature Parity
The Scan QR code feature does not exist in the Mac app. It only exists in the browser extension. Now that I know where to find it, I will remember. But this threw me for a loop for a while trying to figure out what happened.
I am not sure that I agree with having features in the extension that are not in the App. That feels strange to me. I envision that the extension is purely a window into the App. Having feature parity between the app and extension will keep users from second guessing themselves and wasting time looking for features.
Autofill prompt
Safari prompts to allow 1Password to autofill my details. I assume that this is an Apple thing. 1P7 had the same behavior. I would love to acknowledge that once and never again.
Credit Card fill on iOS
Another thing that I assume is Apple, I would LOVE to autofill credit cards from 1Password on iOS.
Extension icon
Can the Safari Extension icon be monochrome, please? It really stands out in the toolbar (Dark Mode). I don't like that.
Autofill Email for new logins
When creating a new account on a website, most of the time 1Password saved the login based off a form that has a password and confirmation fields. There are no form fields that contain an email address. It would be amazing if 1password could have the ability to autofill my email address when a username or email is not provided. This happens to me all of the time and would be a very welcome addition.
Sort Autofill by last used
I have some websites with multiple logins. The suggestions in the autofill are always sort alphabetically. It would be really nice to have this sorted by last used. This way the last account that I used to login was first in the list.
Moving Items between Accounts
While looking at my account situation (see above), I have tried to move some logins from my frozen account into my active Family account. This does not seem possible. What can I do here?
1Password Version: 8.5.0
Extension Version: 2.1.4
OS Version: 12.0.1
Comments
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Hi Joe! 👋
It's great to hear from you. It's been too long since we've met! 🤗
Thanks for reaching out and thank you for composing such a detailed list. This is really good stuff! I'll answer a few of the more specific things and share your feedback with others as well.
Electron: I agree. 😘 I keep telling everyone that 1Password 8 is the best version of 1Password I've ever used and the disbelief is incredible to see. Thankfully many have tried for themselves and gotten over their initial disbelief.
Safari: Regarding having the Safari extension separate, I agree having a single install is better but this change is being driven by a new approach Apple is using where Safari extensions must come from the App Store. Specifically they must be signed by Apple. This gives app review the ability to help strengthen the security of extensions so I totally see why they wanted to take this approach. Since we also have a website version that we want to continue supporting, we needed to ship a separate Safari extension in the App Store. Thankfully once it's installed it's pretty smooth sailing. The only time I find it gets in my way is when I use Alfred to launch Safari and sometimes I'll launch 1Password for Safari by accident. Adding it to the Spotlight Privacy tab solved this issue and along with automatic App Store updates I don't find it that big of a burden.
Accounts: Yeah I think 1Password 7 would only show the frozen banner if any of your accounts were active. If I remember correctly we did this primarily to keep things as simple as possible. Showing the message for specific accounts makes more sense in my mind personally though so I'm happy for this change. And now with a shared code base in Rust I don't mind having a bit more complexity in a few places. 🙂
Account Setup: I go back and forth on this one myself. Accounts feel like a lot more than simply a preference and having a separate window for them gives us a lot more room to breath and flexibility. I can totally see how they would be good to have in the Preferences window as well. I suspect we both go there primarily based on muscle memory and am taking a wait-and-see approach to see if that believe is correct or not.
⌘\: I could write an essay on this one. 🙂 I suspect my RSI will flare up before I'm able to do it justice so I'm just going to say that the behaviour of ⌘\ always felt inverted to me. The default (imo) should have been to prompt and ⌘⌥\ should have been the one to fill automatically. To me the option key should have been needed to do the more advanced thing (fill automatically). Along with the contortions required to make ⌘\ work on non-US keyboards, changing the shortcuts is something we discussed many times over the last 15 years. We thought what better time to experiment then now. We'll see how it turns out but personally I've found the new approach grew on me pretty quick.
Autofill Performance: This is something we've been wrestling with for a while. Having separate processes communicating over new APIs is a challenging experience and one that we've been used to over the last 15 years. We'll get there and from the sounds of it, the team included some goodies in the last update. Super happy to hear that it's helped!
Touch ID and AppleWatch: Super happy to hear the new update helped there. @mitchcohen worked with @nickmcguire on this for a while to polish things out here. They'll be glad to hear you noticed. 😍
Reveal Password: You can use ⌘R to reveal the passwords. The challenge with the option key was you could inadvertently reveal a password while using another keyboard shortcut. Depending on your location this might have disastrous results. With that said, the ⌥ key was so popular that we added a preference for it specifically underneath the Security tab:
Search: Thank you for giving the new approach a try! I too find myself wanting to do more focused searching like you describe. Improvements here are planned and actively being worked on.
Duplicates: Glad you sorted this out. I wonder if 1Password 7 had these hidden from All Vaults? 🤔
Categories: Damn. I was hoping you were going to say you loved the change as much as I do. The sidebar always felt too cramped to me and having the different modes to switch between vaults and the rest confused me frequently. Having categories as a filter directly on top of the items being filtered felt perfect to me and I love it. When I discussed your feedback with @mitchcohen (our product lead) he mentioned he'd love to have a call to go over your list and learn more. If you're open to that I can connect you two.
Feature Parity: Hopefully you can discuss this more with Mitch on your call but from my perspective I've never had a need to scan a TOTP QRCode from anything but a website, so having it in the extension felt like the perfect place. I do like to have multiple ways to find the same functionality, however, so I personally would be open to making this possible from both.
Autofill prompt: Do you mean the prompt that opens up after filling a Credit Card or Identity from the inline menu? We added this to prevent malicious websites from tricking you into filling them without your knowledge. I'm not a huge fan myself but was involved with the change enough to know that it unfortunately is required. At the very least though I'd love to make this once per top level domain (eTLD+1).
Credit Card fill on iOS: Have you been using our new 1Password for Safari on iOS extension? I think you'll find exactly what you're looking for there. 🙌
Extension icon: I was just talking with @danvpeterson about this. I believe he was at the table with us at Mel's that day during WWDC in San Fransisco so y'all have already met. I'll make sure he sees your feedback.
Autofill Email for new logins: This would be great. It's something we'd like to do for sure. I'm not sure if you've seen but we have the ability to fill usernames, passwords, and one-time 2FA codes all automatically with a single click, even when they are spread across multiple pages. Internally we call this our fill session manager. I'd love to see us extend this to include registration forms that are spread out over multiple pages.
Sort Autofill by last used: I'll be honest with you Joe: this would drive me completely nuts as I find alphabetical listings so much easier to reason about. When item sort orders jump around without explicit reasons why, my head always hurts. Now with that said, I suspect you feel the exact same way when they don't. 🙂 So this sounds like a great preference to have. I'm curious: would you expect this ordering to sync across all your devices? If it didn't would it cause you as much pain as it does me?
Moving Items between Accounts: Moving items between accounts should absolutely be possible, even when the source account is frozen. Unless we have a bug you should be able to drag them to a vault on the sidebar, or, use the Move feature within the location bar above the item:
Thanks again for sharing all this great feedback, Joe! And while I don't know how to make it happen, let's find a way to have lunch again at Mel's Diner. 🤗
Take care and stay safe,
++dave;
1Password Founder0 -
Safari: Thanks for the explanation. I got some new 🧠 cells on that one.
Accounts: I could be wrong but I would be willing to bet that many long time users may run into this when they make the jump to v8. I am not sure if I followed some wrong steps when updating to my family account. I was unaware for years that this had happened. You may want to think about some kind of process to handle this before the official launch. Just my 2¢.
⌘\: I will live. My muscles will develop new memories. At least I will always have my "⌘\ is my Password" t-shirt! I may have to wear it a bit less now though so that I make sure it's lasts. 😆
Duplicates: I definitely never saw duplicates in 1P7. I have removed v7 from my Mac. If I reinstall it, would that help?
Autofill Prompt: Yes. I am referring to autofilling Credit Card and Identity. I am all for protecting the common person from getting scammed. I would like to think that I would never autofill data that I don't explicitly want to. If a preference for this is possible, I would definitely welcome that.
Credit Card fill on iOS: What? 🤯🤦♂️ Ok. Totally missed the new extension... 🎉
Categories: I think that I am a much simpler 1Password user than you and everyone else at Agile. I use one account, Now I know that I have 2 but never knew that until yesterday. The new sidebar layout did help me realized that. So that is something. Probably 95% of my logins are stored in my Private vault. The rest are in a single Family Share vault. I don't use tags (maybe I should). The categories were pretty much the only thing that I used in the sidebar. I am not sure why having them there in a collapsable group would be a bad thing. If they are in the way, collapse it. Just like tags.
Autofill Email for new login: I definitely love the ability to autofill logins with a single click. Maybe I didn't convey my idea well enough. I have many logins stored inside 1Password that only have a password and no username/email. Therefore, when I go fill in the login, only the password gets filled. I would love to see 2 things... a way to possibly bulk fix that from within the app. Then 1P recognizes that when a login is saved without a username/email, that it could autofill my default email or prompt me to.
Sort Autofill by last used: This is probably the most vein request. I get that. Poor me might have to hit the down arrow once or twice before I hit enter! Most of the time when I have multiple logins for a site, I have a login that I use more often than others. Right now, I just make sure that I name my items so that the one I use most is always at the top. K.I.S.S.
Moving Items between Accounts: Move is not an option on any items inside of my frozen account. I did figure out that I can Duplicate an item into my active account though. It seems that any new login that has been created since v8 was done inside of my frozen account. Can you change the default account that new items get saved to?
I was trying to drag and drop items from my frozen account and that was not working. This would be be great. Going through the duplicate process is click intensive. With drag and drop, I would hopefully select multiple items and drag them into my active account. Once I make sure that the frozen account does not have anything extra in it, I will simply delete that account since I do not need it.
OK. This is completely unrelated....
I know that you love Alfred. One of its strengths is app launching. I wanted to share with you my new way of launching the apps that I use the most. I launched apps from Alfred for as long as I can remember. However, typing the names of the various apps 1000x per day got old. So I came up with a new process that is insane. It involves Keyboard Maestro and the Hyper key (via Karabiner Elements).
Karabiner allows you to remap your caps lock key to be a hyper key (cmd+option+ctrl+shift). I use the hyper key to quickly launch apps and various workflows. For example, I open Safari all of the time. Before I would use Alfred: cmd+space, then start typing safari, hit enter. Now I simply use hyper+S. This will open a new Safari window or activate any existing windows that may be open.
I cannot tell you how such a small change like this has boosted my productivity. It's amazing. You should try it. It does mean that you need to live without a caps lock key. However, your are Canadian. You don't yell anyways... 🇨🇦
I couldn't upload images for some reason so here are a couple of links to look at...
Karabiner: https://d.pr/i/blBIR8
Keyboard Maestro Workflow: https://d.pr/i/HWvgqQ0 -
Hey @joeworkman! Long time no see, hope you're doing well :)
Looks like Dave already did a great job responding here but wanted to chime in around the extension icon design since he tagged me in. Currently, we really wanted to make the extension icons across all browser match, and most browser extension icons these days seem to moving toward full color (including a lot, maybe most, Safari extensions I've seen). One other problem with the monochrome version was that when inverted, for dark mode, it never looks right to me because the keyhole (rectangle) in the middle ends up white, instead of dark as it should be. So then you need two versions for light and dark mode, and not all browsers even give you the capability to swap automatically based on the system or browser theme.
All that to say, it was a more complicated decision than it may seem, but we will definitely continue to consider some design changes there, and I appreciate the feedback! I used to be pretty hardcore on the "keep it monochrome!" side of things myself, and only came over to the color version after seeing most others I use go in that direction, and the complexities that the monochrome version added.
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Interesting. I have not noticed this trend in extension icons. I enabled every extension that I had installed.
I don't have a ton of extensions installed. Sadly most extension developers don't know what they are doing an affect too much of my browsing experience and dev workflow. I make software for web designers so I get a constant stream of issues from customers caused by extensions. But I am getting off track...
I would be willing to bet that most extension developers out there are not as talented as you. They definitely don't have the same design sense. You just need to look at the extension store and see for yourself. Imagine having a stream of those icons in your browser toolbar? Sometimes leading by example is better than following trends. Good design will always be good.
It's been too long Dan. Your beard game is still strong. Keeping rocking it!
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There were / are numerous threads from single (or family) vault users about having categories in the side bar.
I would love to see them back, it's pretty much pointless for me at the moment.
Don't have many vaults, no favourites and the only tags are those which 1P created on an import by the looks of things.
I now have to have multiple clicks whereas it used to be one.Lots of 'thanks for your feedback we'll pass it on' and ignore it. Not seen one satisfactory response as to why it can't be returned.
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