Update about Autofill improvements in Beta
Hey folks,
We’ve worked hard over the last three months to improve the reliability of Autofill in complex situations, such as when you have multiple items for the same website or want certain items to only be shown on a specific page.
If you’ve been using the beta, you might’ve run into the following improvements already:
- When editing an item, you can now access the “Autofill Behavior” menu, which lets you customize how an item will show on a specific page;
- When signing into websites, an opt-in improvement to the Autofill algorithm generates more reliable results in complex situations where subdomains, ports, and paths matter in order to prioritize certain items over others.
We appreciate your curiosity and have been looking on eagerly as you discovered and tested these new features. Your feedback has been very helpful, and we’re keeping track of what you shared so we can incorporate it into future versions of 1Password.
Over the last week, we’ve decided to temporarily retire the “Improved Autofill suggestions” feature. This is due to us having a very busy roadmap ahead of us and not being able to prioritize making this feature as good as it should be for the time being. However, please rest assured that we will return to it later this year and ensure it addresses all your feedback.
What this means for you
Within upcoming betas, you’ll keep seeing the “Autofill Behavior” menu. That’s not going away, and it will keep working as expected. It is slated to enter the production channel within a month or two once we’re comfortable with its performance.
The toggles for Improved Autofill Suggestions will gradually disappear from the Browser Extension and 1Password 8 betas. The behavior will revert to the original version of Autofill regardless of whether you’ve switched to the new version.
As mentioned above, we’re not abandoning this feature permanently; we’re just ensuring we’ll have enough time when we get back to working on it to truly make it shine.
Thank you for your understanding! We’re always open to your feedback and questions, so please let us know if there’s anything we can help with.
Cheers,
Gabriele
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Browser:_ Not Provided
Comments
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Hi, I returned to 1Password (upgrading my personal version to the family version) after I had abandoned it only because I saw that this feature had finally been introduced. From the tests I have done, the behavior is quite satisfactory, albeit with some minor flaws (duplicate items in some situations). How can I know when this feature will be retired? I would like to avoid going back to the previous behavior, even if it meant not updating the desktop version and the extension for a while...
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Hey @vidario, the plan is to retire the improved "Autofill Suggestions" within the next beta update or two. While you can disable auto-updating in the desktop app's settings, I don't know of a way to disable automatic updates to the browser extension since they are managed by the browser. I would also recommend against disabling automatic updates on either because you'll miss out on potentially important security or functionality updates that might affect your experience negatively.
I've shared your feedback about wanting to keep access to these features with the team :)
Cheers,
Gabriele0 -
I think it is a good start for the improved autofill behavior. Please take your time and concentrate on more important things, like the iOS issues with unlocking the app. 👍
I'm looking forward to an improved autofill behavior later this year.
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Hi folks!
Thank you to everyone that has taken the time to download our beta extension and give the alternative algorithm a try!
It’s important to recognize that 1Password, specifically the Authentication team that leads the Filling and Saving experience, has an important role for improving the overall day-to-day experience of our customers. The alternative algorithm definitely has that potential in the future. However, with "Advanced URL Matching" still in active development, as well as numerous other improvements we have planned for the near future, I strongly believe we will be releasing new features and improvements that have had their value proven to our customers and will substantially improve the overall Filling and Saving experience for everyone. Those priorities and sheer volume of improvements are the right investment which was the core reason we decided to deprioritize development of the alternative algorithm at this time.
I encourage all of our beta extension users to keep it installed as they will have first crack at some truly amazing features and innovations coming soon.
I think @DenalB said it best:
"I think it is a good start for the improved autofill behavior. Please take your time... I'm looking forward to an improved autofill behavior later this year."Best regards,
Travis Hogan
Senior Product Manager - Authentication
1Password0 -
@DenalB: We evidently rate what is more important very differently.
For us as a company (with several tousends of PW entries), it is more important to have a reasonable autofill than any "iOS issues unlocking... something" :)Ultimately, however, I do not know the customer structure of 1Password and with which customers the most revenue is made and therefore which customers groups are the most important.
I can only say what we are missing the most.0 -
@GDZ : Guess what? I don't have problems unlocking my iOS devices with 1Password 8. So, for me personally, it's not an issue ... But I see and read a lot of customers having such an issue here. But there are also a lot of requests for a better autofill feature ...😉
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I think there may be some confusion about the autofill improvements discussed here. I originally thought it was a single new feature, allowing users to specify they'd like certain entries to have different "Autofill Behavior" and that to enable it one had to select "Improved Autofill Suggestions" in their extension.
However it seems like these might be two distinct features that are mostly unconnected, one of which ("Autofill Behavior") will be staying while the other ("Improved Autofill Suggestions") will be removed for the time being. Is that accurate?
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@kfoley yes, it's confusing to me as well. What I need: choose how much of the URL to match ... is that the part that's staying
@ag_Gabriele, can you shed some light?0 -
However it seems like these might be two distinct features that are mostly unconnected, one of which ("Autofill Behavior") will be staying while the other ("Improved Autofill Suggestions") will be removed for the time being. Is that accurate?
That's what I understood from this discussion. I only used the "Autofill Behavior" in the Desktop app, because "Improved Autofill Suggestions" didn't work for me well. So I disabled this setting in the browser extension some days after it was introduced. The "Autofill Behavior" works for me. So I'll leave it enabled.
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I am EXCEPTIONALLY disappointed that 1Password has apparently de-prioritized an extremely important feature. In fact, the exact URL matching issue is THE most frustrating thing about 1Password. Period. Full stop. Bitwarden and others have MUCH more advanced features here. This change in direction is HIGHLY concerning about how 1Password views daily usability issues. I may now seriously look at Bitwarden as they seem to value usability more. 1Password, you have seriously failed.
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I did not understand whether both features will disappear in the next betas or just the browser extension feature.
@ag_Gabriele was talking about the desktop client so I expect both features will be removed. Is that correct?0 -
Was relieved to see the addition of this feature in the beta -- a feature which MANY people have been clamoring for for years, including me. It's not perfect -- it still suggests a bunch of stuff on the list that doesn't apply. But at least the most likely (and usually correct one) is usually the first suggestion. Now you're taking it away?? I'm sorry -- but beta software is not supposed to be modified at the feature level, that's alpha level software. Betas are supposed to be for bug fixes only -- at least that has been my experience at every software company I've ever written for. I remain extremely perplexed (to put it mildly) that 1P does such a poor job with URL fragment matching -- and still don't understand why it hasn't been highly prioritized to fix ages ago. It remains, in my opinion, the single biggest BUG in an otherwise great product. And now to find out you finally made it better only to yank it away again just leaves me even more "perplexed."
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@BLD Totally agree. On a DAILY basis for years I have to contend with the terrible URL matching. Competitors nailed this many, many years ago. Then it goes into beta, 1P promotes it on Twitter as something like "you will love what we are doing..", then PULL it and re-prioritize other features above this? Unacceptable. The product manager in charge of this feature needs a reality check, as they seem detached from how people use and experience the terrible matching behavior.
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@AG_Travis Have you surveyed a significant statistical sample of your user base over this issue? Just based on my casual reading of your boards over the years and my own experience with 1P, I am willing to bet that the overwhelming majority would pick this issue as your #1 problem by far to fix.
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Hi @vidario @steve28 @TravelSD @BLD
@kfoley and @DenalB are correct - the Autofill Behaviour settings will be retained within the desktop app betas. Currently, if you do adjust the Autofill Behaviour settings in the desktop app, they will be respected on all platforms. The ability to adjust Autofill Behaviour settings on other platforms is a priority and will be released in beta in the near future. The alternative autofill suggestions algorithm work that has been de-prioritized has no impact on the Autofill Behaviour settings or their function. They are separate projects.
@BLD Autofill Behaviour settings weren't the most requested/biggest issue folks have been having with the Filling and Saving experience, but we will be releasing several features and improvements in the near future that do address the most requested/biggest issues customers have. Really excited to get them into beta sooner rather than later.
I hope this clarifies any confusion.
Best regards,
Travis Hogan
Senior Product Manager - Authentication
1Password0 -
@AG_Travis This is terribly confusing. I'm referring to the "Autofill - Improved Autofill Suggestions" accessible in the settings for the beta browser extensions 2.6.1 for Chrome and Firefox (I'm currently using the production channel version of the desktop app, 8.9.13) . What are you referring to with "Autofill Behaviour" settings?
The "Autofill - Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser beta extension setting definitely improves the URL matching.
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I just installed the 8.10.0 beta of the desktop app and enabled the "Experimental Autofill Suggestions" (I didn't see any setting called "Autofill Behavior") and I can't tell what effect it has on anything. The URL matching improvements only seem to happen with the browser extension setting on Chrome and Firefox.
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Try editing a record... in the url field you should have the possibility to change the behaviour for autofill
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@ag_Gabriele or @AG_Travis -- I'm experimenting with the new autofill behaviors and the first thing I note is that the link to help documentation in the 1Password desktop client takes you to a non-existent page: https://support.1password.com/autofill-behavior/ .
Correct link but page not published, or link wrong? It's a 404, not a 403, so I'm assuming it's either of those and not a permissions issue. Regardless, would love to read the docs on how you expect this to work.
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Followup and comments on current behavior (using macOS desktop beta 8.10.0 and Firefox plugin beta 2.6.1).
I'm not sure what the expected behavior is currently, but neither the desktop beta specification "only fill on this exact domain" nor the (apparently on-the-way-out) "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser plug-in seem to have any affect on what entries are offered or allowed for a given website. That is:
- I can still select and fill any 1Password entry regardless of the "Autofill Behavior" setting of "only fill..." or "never fill..." options.
- The options "only" or "never" also seem to have no affect on what options are suggested, nor the order of the suggestions.
- The "Improved Autofill Suggestions" browser extension setting seems to do nothing, though it may now be a meaningless option, with the underlying behavior disabled.
- Furthermore, it has never been apparent to me that the same "improve suggestions" feature did anything useful in the context of multiple items with matching (second-level) domain names - that is, if a website matches
*.example.com, it will be offered. That's unfortunately not very helpful when one has many sets of credentials for many sub-domains; e.g.only-this.example.com.
I'm not sure if there is documented intended behavior, but as I noted in a previous comment, the referenced webpage about "autofill behavior" is currently a 404. Knowing what the current or future expected behavior would give us all a common starting point to discuss. Any chance someone from 1P/AB can share that?
The fundamental use case is someone (like me and my whole company) who work with many systems that have similar or exact domain matches. That is, it's only the full hostname that really matters most of the time. If I have
foo.example.com, I'm (almost) never going to want that to fill onbar.example.com. Moreover, it's rarely helpful to even suggest anything else from the entire domainexample.comwhen there is an exact match for the full hostname (and possibly port) of a given URL for a given 1P entry.So, this is are first cut at the critical requirements for a suitable implementation of autofill suggestion ordering:
- URL matches also designated "only fill on this exact domain"
- exact domain matches, including ports and paths
- exact domain matches, excluding ports and paths
- closest match considering matching sub-domains as more relevant (e.g. if filling on
host.example.com, suggesthost.example.combeforeexample.com, and both before anyother.example.com) - closest match, using something like Levenshtein distance, w/ and w/out port or path components.
- favorited entries, matching base domain
- everything else, possibly after a visual break and perhaps a heading like "possible alternatives"
- Anything marked as "never fill" should never even be suggested.
As a bonus, if there was some way to specify regular expressions or GLOB-style matching (e.g.
*.sub.domain.comorfoo[0-9]*.example.com) to match multiple allowed sub-domains or hosts.With that, the suggested ordering will more closely match what people are trying to do, which is the whole point of anything that is trying to guess (suggest) what the user is trying to do (aka. intent recognition).
I hope that is useful, and really hope that it somewhat matches what the 1P team is working towards. I'm happy to iterate on the requirements if someone wants more input from someone who has 1000s (yes 1000s) of entries and dozens or 100s of entries that match and are suggested currently.
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Just wanted to say thank you! I have several subdomains in my home lab server, and now it's 100x easier to autofill credentials.
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@DeniDoman - I'm really curious what you've done to feel as if the current implementation is an improvement? I'm still struggling with all the same issues I described at length in my previous post (just above yours). That's still true even though I'm on the latest beta (8.10.1) and browser extension (Firefox, w/ version 2.8.0).
Fundamentally, I still get all the wrong suggestions up front because they match the second-level domain name of my network(s) (e.g. example.com), and yet I'm looking for the one and only entry that immediately matches the exact URL (e.g.
https://thing.example.com).I'd also like to hear some feedback from Agile Bits, perhaps @ag_Gabriele, on what is the eventual direction of the autofill suggestions. I made some very reasonable suggestions myself and I've heard nothing but crickets. :-(
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@esquared I have about 10 domains at my homeserver, e.g.:
- name1.domain.com
- name2.domain.com
- name3.domain.com
- ...
- name10.domain.com
And with the new option "only fill on this exact domain" enabled for all of them - I see only two options (name1 and name4) instead of 10. Second one is incorrect, seems it's a bug, but two are still better then 10 :)
UPD: Now second item has disappeared. It has 4 websites, 2 of them were on my domain and have new option enabled, other two were on different domain and new option was disabled. After setting new option for all 4 websites - the issue gone and now it credentials shown only on these 4 domains.
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@DeniDoman - thanks for the feedback. The problem as I see it, is that I have 100s of entries for each network I manage, and I cannot possibly go through and check the box for "fill only on this exact domain" on each one - in fact, that would be problematic, since I have the same entry (password) on several subdomains (e.g.
switch1.example.comthroughswitch15.example.com) and therefore I'd have to check that box on each and every URL in the entry. Heck, I'm not even sure it's going to do the right thing.There is way more information in the set of URLs that a given entry has than 1Password takes advantage of currently. Hence my suggestion that some form of smart ordering based upon match factors (e.g. exact match, match w/out ports, Levenshtein distance, etc) would provide a whole lot of more value for a lot of people without requiring that they turn the fill suggestion into a overly simplistic boolean.
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@esquared I just have about 10 domains at my homeserver, e.g.
- name1.domain.com
- name2.domain.com
- name3.domain.com
- ...
- name10.domain.com
And with the new option "only fill on this exact domain" - I see only two options (name1 and name4) instead of 10. Second one is incorrect, seems it's a bug, but two are still better then 10 :)
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Hi all, not sure if 1P is still listening to these threads @AG_Travis , but I want to first thank you for the functionality, and I appreciate how quickly you were able to get this work done in the beta.
I'm going to make an assumption that many of the users who want this feature would be of the following personas:
- Technical users (developers or PMs)
- Migrating from a competitor
and if so, their use cases fall into one of a few buckets:
- 1) They have a handful of cases where this is useful, but are happy with the default behavior.
- 2) They have many cases (in some cases maybe an entire Vault) where they want to change all at once.
- 3) They need to customize the behavior across a variety of different entries.
Your current solution addresses bucket #1.
For bucket #2, it is also likely that it's a one-time operation, and that future items might benefit from a default, but could be managed on a 1 by 1 basis after the initial batch processing.
For bucket #3, customization for technical users is best done at the API level, if it's done at all as this is likely only a handful of highly technical users who have this case.
Given this, I strongly recommend, regardless of what you might want to do with the feature in the future that you at minimum expose the current autofill override functionality to the CLI, so that your technical users can either write a simple loop to apply to a subset of items, or can configure their own logic to determine which ones should have the logic and which ones should not. For non-technical users who are migrating from a competitor, my guess is they'll land on a support forum like this, and a more experienced user can explain (or even provide) a script that does what they want.
Without this, at the moment it's just a painful transition for people such as myself who have had this feature for years in a competitor offering.
Thanks!
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In response to @filmjbrandon (with apologies), and to any ABits folks (e.g. @AG_Travis or @ag_Gabriele), the problem is much bigger, IMO, than simply exposing an API to allow capable people to hack on their entries en-masse. While a nice idea, the fundamental solution that AG has exposed, namely the idea of "only fill on this exact domain", is completely insufficient to handle even the most modest of use cases. Let me explain my thinking:
Imagine even a small business IT/DevOps group with a modest number of (in-house or cloud-based) hosts they manage. Even some of the smallest such organizations will have dozens of "hosts", and they will likely be added to (or removed) over time. Having to set some "only fill on exactly this domain" on each new entry is exceedingly painful and, IMO, completely unnecessary. There is more than sufficient information even given the limited form of URLs that can be usefully entered into 1Password. With some useful heuristics, one can simply sort the entries by a closest-match algorithm and thus present the user with the most likely entry up front, with no manual work on the part of the user. For a complete solution, I urge anyone to look at my suggestions in an earlier post:
https://1password.community/discussion/comment/673589/#Comment_673589
Furthermore, with a little bit of additional smarts, e.g. if the tool supported some form of regex in the URLs, those with even modestly complicated environments, like my own, could say things like:
https://server[0-9].example.com
... and have the entry match a collection of hosts rather than being forced to add a separate URL for each of those N hosts.
Furthermore, this will support even novice users, and those who cannot (or don't want to) work though an API to flip bits on every entry.
Now, I know that the ABits folks are good and talented, and that they'd rather keep internal ideas mum for competitive advantage, but someone from AG could at least comment on my proposed set of changes, even say "interesting idea - we'll take it to the dev team", that would be greatly appreciated.
As it stands now, the 1P8 approach, with the removal of the "smart suggestions" feature, is again a step backwards from the excellent 1P7 version.
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