1P 8 UI/UX under electron is pain
Is this a question or a rant? I'm not really sure. Probably some of both.
I'll be honest. I don't like Electron for the typical reasons (bloat, etc) but also because for some Electron-based apps it feels like the UI/UX designers just phoned it in and don't really care about the desktop experience. They know web and so they use that paradigm to design a desktop UI. Given 1P's history of thoughtful, intelligent UI/UX I don't think that's the case here. And yet, I'm so frustrated with the "new" Electron-based 1P app introduced with v8 that I'm not sure what to think anymore. I've held off, hoping it would get better or I'd get used to the new UX.
No idea what this is supposed to mean, but I was doing the same thing I do several times per day and trying to auto-fill my SSO login in Safari. 1P decided to be especially dumb with a message about "1Password can't verify that 1Password should have access to (this) item". This also apparently trigged a "new login from Safari" email. This was the first time for this problem.
This nonsense, however, is frequent when trying to use cmd+\ to auto-fill a web login, regardless of Safari or Firefox:
Why are there two different prompts? What's the point of the one at the top? I have no idea. Go away
The UI is so hit or miss that these things happen sometimes:
- The prompt up top has suggestions (most of the time it seems to have no context or awareness)
- Hitting esc to make this go away works, other times no. Go away
- This "quick access" prompt doesn't show up. Good, I didn't want it to - but why doesn't it behave this way all the time?
- After having to close the unwanted quick access prompt, the browser inline suggestions aren't focused. That is, the arrow keys can't be used to select the correct 1P item. This is maybe about half the time. The other half is fine, can use the arrow keys to select the right one.
- There's an additional prompt asking "do you want to let 1P fill in this field?"
- 1P (including the inline prompt) more broadly gets confused and doesn't know where it is or what page it is on - so it has no suggestions, despite the target being a "well known" frequently visited page. Further, this sometimes this leads to "1Password can't verify that (such and such) should have access..." prompts.
A few days ago, I was trying to work through a forced password reset and somehow 1P got to where it wanted to suggest a new password to replace the new password I had just generated. So in the edit view of the 1P item, there was some little bubble under the masked password that I can't remember what it said. I was kind of irritated because 1P was already being kind of a pain (and everyone with strong passwords hates forced password change), so I was trying to ignore the bubble to keep it from generating a (second) new password -- and without hitting esc and dumping all of the changes to the item. I repeatedly tried to copy from the password field (highlight, cmd+c; reveal password, highlight, cmd+c), and it wouldn't copy. I kept pasting my old password (because "confirm your current password") into the site's new password prompt. After several failed attempts, I finally right clicked on the password field in 1P to try to copy it from the context menu. Up pops a little tiny context menu just tall and wide enough to fit 'copy' and 'paste' - but interestingly lacking the normal keyboard shortcut hints. Oh good, use the weird looking context menu and now the copy happens correctly.
1P 8 is a painful experience when compared to the versions that came before it. It used to be easy and fast to use. It was almost always cmd+\ (maybe vault password to unlock, maybe arrow to the right suggestion if there are multiple logins for that site) and done. v8 seems like half the time it has no idea what's going on. IMHO v8 has degraded the UX significantly from 7 and prior. I don't know how much of that's because of Electron, or because new design. I'm frustrated because 1P is one of those core tools that I use to get through my day of passwords everywhere for everything - and the really stupid ones where (some thing) requires a series of passwords.
Inconsistent and what comes off as broken behavior is a minor hassle if it happens once. When it disrupts your workflow several times - just trying to get from A to B while also trying to keep track of 10 things in your head, and .... then having to stop in the middle to deal with 1P - that's a something else.
1Password Version: 8.8.0
Extension Version: 2.3.7
OS Version: macOS 11.5.2
Browser:_ Safari, Firefox
Comments
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It's hard to know what to do or say about this. Open digikey.com, hit cmd+\ and as noted above, get two different prompts at the same time. One is correct, the other wants to fill my 1Password account credentials into a not-1Password website. I don't know where 1P has gone off the rails, but this is going from inconvenient and annoying into danger of credentials going to the wrong site territory. Digikey is an example. I've noticed this happening with several sites lately.
My memory is far from perfect, but I cannot ever recall encountering these kinds of issues prior to 1P8.
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Hi @rhornsby:
Thanks for letting us know about this. We've made some improvements to this situation in our beta and nightly releases. If you look for your 1Password Account item in 1Password 8, are there currently any linked applications? If there are, remove them, and that should improve your state of play. Let me know.
Jack
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Sorry for the delay. No, there are no other sites associated in 1P with my 1P account. There is no good reason why 1P is prompting to put my 1P account credentials into other websites (plural).
This version of the 1P desktop app is a dumpster fire of inconsistency. The same dumb UI/UX issues described above are happening on a brand new (not migrated, so really actually new) M1 Mac running Monterey. Safari is worse, but Firefox is nearly as bad.
All I want to do is get the same behavior I had in 1P 7: hit cmd+\ and have 1P do its like thing like a normal password manager application. It's so infuriating when 1P sometimes does nothing, sometimes presents itself under the browser window, sometimes steals focus from the browser and doesn't put it back, sometimes does a half dozen other different things instead of what it's supposed to do - fill the site credentials.
1P is the only installed Safari extension. In Firefox until a couple of days ago when i needed to add the Mozilla Containers extension, 1P was the only installed extension there as well.
None of this nonsense was present in 1P 7. The only reason I haven't given up yet and gone to another product is that until v8 1P has been a great experience going back to when I first started using it at around v3.
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No, there are no other sites associated in 1P with my 1P account. There is no good reason why 1P is prompting to put my 1P account credentials into other websites (plural).
In this case, we're looking for Linked Apps, rather than additional
websitefields. If, for example, your 1Password Account item had become linked to the browser itself, then Quick Access would offer you that item if your browser is foremost. Have a look to see if that's the case. It would look a bit like this, using Chrome as the example:
Let me know what you find.
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@rhornsby Thank you for this detailed write-up! My sentiments exactly... it's sad. I've been a user for years and recommended the app/service to so many. Now I'm hearing all the complaints from the same people, sigh.
I've been wondering if there's pressure to cut costs by going to Electron and having more cross-platform development. I just hope they can right the ship. For years, I loved 1password as it saved me a ton of time and genuinely made me more productive. Now it's lowering productivity.
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This is how dumb 1P v8 is being. 3 examples of the trying (or not) to use my 1Password.com credentials since yesterday. Twice prompting to use 1P credentials for things completely unrelated, and then complaining that it doesn't think I should use my 1P credentials to log into ........ 1password.com.
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I give up. I'm sorry to the wonderful 1P folks I know are dedicated and work so hard to make 1P a great experience. 1P8 is, as far as I'm concerned, a disaster. The UI's inconsistent behavior is maddening. It is more common for cmd+\ to do the wrong thing, forcing me to stop whatever I'm doing and back out - sometimes having to back up several steps - before I can try cmd+\ again. Some kind of manual intervention is often still required to get 1P8 to fill the form correctly.
I rebuilt my MBP recently and installed 1P7 when I saw that it was an option - and to the surprise of no one, it worked perfectly, behaving like a normal, well-adjusted application. I've uninstalled 1P8 on my daily driver Mac and will be using 1P7 until either I can't use it anymore because it dies, or I find an alternative. Sadly, I don't think there is a better desktop product than 1P for password management out there. Whatever the case, I've had enough of 1P8's nonsense.
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