Feedback after 1 month of daily v8 usage: more complex to use, slower
I’ve been using v8 on my work computer for a month now. I'm about to revert to v7, but I wanted to send feedback on my overall product-level impression after using v8 daily.
To summarize: v7 felt like one product with a consistent experience that helped speed up navigating the web. v8 feels like using a collection of separate products that don't quite fit together and get in the way of navigating the web. I was OK living with some missing features while v8 evolves, but I don't have the patience to use an essential tool that slows me down.
Here are some of the issues I keep running into:
The new browser extension has complicated the overall process of using 1password for me by introducing a totally different UI with a different featureset and keyboard shortcut than Quick Access.
- With v7, I could invoke 1pw mini with a single global keyboard shortcut, and it was a consistent experience no matter what I was doing. With v8 I have to toggle between Quick Access and the browser extension depending on the situation, and they feel like entirely separate products. (With the extension, I'm talking about the UI you get when clicking the browser toolbar icon or using the browser keyboard shortcut, not the inline input field dropdowns.)
I would be happy to ignore the extension in favor of just using Quick Access, but Quick Access is glitchy (also IMO not a great replacement for mini, but that's been covered elsewhere). It doesn’t work when invoked on an empty tab, and occasionally doesn’t show logins for the site I’m viewing. When this happens I use the 1pw browser extension which doesn’t have these issues.
- Having to think about which to invoke depending on context trashes muscle memory.
Performance is mediocre. To be fair, I'm not hitting serious performance walls or ballooning memory issues indicative of bugs. Instead, I repeatedly encounter empty views that take a beat to display data, so the user experience feels slow.
- Quick Access often first shows up as an empty window, and there's a noticeable pause before it shows a search field, icons and data.
- The browser extension UI is similarly slow to populate data for matching logins, with icons appearing last of all.
- These loading times are all <1 second, but noticeable enough that I'm ready to type, and then have to wait for 1pw to load a view so that I can interact with it.
- For context, I’m using a 2020 MacBook Pro. Not top of the line by today’s Apple Silicon standards, but I imagine the baseline target machine for an average consumer is older & less powerful than this?
Lastly, the browser extensions don't feel like they integrate well with the rest of the app. I know that some features are still in the works, like support for Collections, but at a more general level it just feels like the extensions exist in their own universe.
- Each browser extension has its own settings instead of everything being centrally managed through the main app. It's a nuisance to set up the extensions in a dev/testing environment where you use multiple browsers, as you have to change the settings for each browser individually.
- The keyboard shortcut isn't discoverable as it's not shown in the main app. I had no idea how to get to the extension with a keyboard shortcut until I happened to read about it in a forum post.
- The 1pw lock state is displayed on the browser toolbar icon, and it's usually out of sync with the main app until I interact with the extension.
I'm going to revert to watching v8 progress from the sidelines.
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Comments
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I've noticed the performance issues as well. 1P8 is one of a very few things that makes my M1 MBA feels slow and lagging. Not when you are in the actual app, but when you're in the browser and waiting for the unlock to complete and give a list of logins for a form, and stuff like that. It's not the end of the world, but it's very noticeable on a Mac that usually feels so quick and responsive.
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