1Password Chrome extension doesn't always take focus when unlocking

renn
renn
Community Member
edited March 2018 in 1Password 7 for Windows

I've noticed this for the past few versions and I tried searching to see if someone else had a similar issue but couldn't find it, so I figured I would post here.

Occasionally, if the vault is locked and I need to unlock it and I click on the icon in Chrome, the vault password textbox does not always take focus away from the browser itself. If I start typing my password, I end up doing so in the text field of the web page I am currently on.

It doesn't always happen. Sometimes "nothing" has focus and I type into oblivion. Sometimes the vault password field successfully has focus. It's confusing what has focus, because the vault password textbox will always have the blinking input cursor regardless of whether it actually has focus or not.

The remedy is to always click on the vault password field and start typing that way. However, this is not intuitive because, as I said, the textbox displays the blinking text cursor indicating that the box has focus but it doesn't always. As a result, you have to consciously remember that the vault password textbox is lying to you sometimes and so you can't trust it!

Hopefully you guys can find the problem and fix it. I hope so! It's a small thing but it does irritate me when it happens.

(PS - Love the product. Been a user for years!)


1Password Version: 6.8.496
Extension Version: 4.7.0.90
OS Version: Windows 10
Sync Type: 1Password Sync

Comments

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni
    edited March 2018

    @renn: Thanks for the kind words, and your long-time support! I'm glad you got in touch. While this is an issue that we're aware of and not happy with, we unfortunately don't have any real control over window focus. That's all handled by Windows. We've made some changes to try to work around it, but it isn't something we're even able to reproduce consistently ourselves. If you have any additional details that you think might help us track down the cause, please let us know. The only thing I'm aware of is it seems to happen with Chrome. It's definitely something we'll continue to work on though. Thanks for your feedback on this! :blush:

  • renn
    renn
    Community Member
    edited March 2018

    Thanks Brenty for the reply. I’m happy to hear you guys know about it and are trying to fix it. I have been trying to consistently reproduce it but I have not been able to find a way that works every time. I will keep trying and let you know if I’m successful.

  • renn
    renn
    Community Member

    @brenty PS - For what it’s worth, I never encountered this error with 1Password 4 or 5. Not sure if that means anything but I thought I’d mention it.

  • @renn: Your experience is about the same as most trying to reproduce this problem. None of us can make it happen consistently, and some of us have never seen it at all. I remember I once got all excited because I was able to make it happen a few times in a row and ran off to tell everyone. The next day, they all told me it didn't work and, lo and behold, it had stopped working for me too. Phooey. If you ever do find a reliable method, please do let us know. We'd all be giddy to hear about it. :chuffed:

  • kimu
    kimu
    Community Member

    I have the same issue, but in my case the focus is very often in some username or password field on the web page of the website I am trying to get access to.
    I have typed my 1Password's password in so many text fields on various web pages so far, and in some cases even submitted, that I wonder if I can consider it safe any longer. I should probably change it every time it happens.
    Now my password also appears in the form suggestions in Chrome, that says everything. That is really undermining the security offered by your product all entirely.

    I am a little bit surprised by this issue you're having seeing that other chrome extensions, like Asana, that works pretty much in the same way, does not have a single issue with focus.
    In my case the focus very often remains on the original form field that had it before I clicked on the 1Password extension icon, but the password text field on the extension window is clearly blinking.
    It looks to me like your extension is fighting with the web page to obtain the focus more than an issue with Windows focus management.

    Anyway, I hope you manage to find a solution at the earliest because it's very very annoying. Maybe the guys at Asana can lend you an hand...

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @kimu: I'm admittedly not familiar with Asana, but 1Password is fairly unique in that it's a separate app using an extension to integrate with the browser. And that's simplifying. There are a number of moving parts, both with 1Password and involving Chrome Native Messaging. I'm really sorry that this is affect you or anyone else. I think saying it's "very annoying" is an understatement. We don't have a solution to this problem right now, but we'll keep working to see if we can find one. Thanks for your feedback and patience. :blush:

  • robbb
    robbb
    Community Member

    I can generally replicate this when on the login page of Salesforce. The focus generally seems to skip to the page so when I'm thinking I'm typing my master password in 1Password I'm actually writing it in the username field on the page leaving all to see, not ideal!!

  • @robbb: The website also asking for focus in a certain field could certainly play a role, as kimu mentioned above. That said, we've yet to find a single site on which we can reliable reproduce the problem and regardless this doesn't seem to affect everyone. I've run into it a handful of times myself and even once thought I had it figured out, but it's generally extremely rare in my experience. I actually can't remember the last time it happened to me, but I also have a fairly long auto-lock timer, so I'm not a statistically significant sample on my own. As others have said here, where focus ends up is ultimately up to Windows. It's up to us to figure a way to give the best guarantee we possibly can that focus will be where we want it when we want it there and we'll continue to work to further that goal. :chuffed:

  • duncm
    duncm
    Community Member

    Hello @bundtkate / @brenty !

    In the last couple of months I've switched to using Windows as my primary OS and have just seen this happen with Chrome 69.0.3497.100 and 1Password 7.2.580. In this case, both the login form and 1Password mini had active blinking cursors but the actual focus was on the login form. I've also seen this on both Chrome/Firefox with 1Password for Windows 6.x in the past.

    One way I do seem to be able to reliably reproduce this is by exiting the 1Password app. Then, by clicking on the extension icon, this automatically restarts 1Password but takes one or two seconds to load and display 1Password mini, and during this time the focus remains on the login form. So perhaps this issue might be related to restarts triggered by auto updates?

    However, with this method the focus switches to 1Password mini as soon as it displays, unlike the other times where 1Password mini is visible but focus remains on the login form.

    Also, to answer @brenty's question from this discussion:

    One question: did you ever encounter this issue when using the keyboard shortcut, or just clicking the 1Password toolbar button in the browser?

    I've only ever seen this happen when clicking the 1Password toolbar button in the browser.

  • Hi @duncm,

    Thanks for writing in.

    So perhaps this issue might be related to restarts triggered by auto updates?

    We added the automatic update in the version 6.6 update last June and we had some reports long before that update. We've tested this when we were adding automatic updates to make sure 1Password extension can reconnect properly and fill again, we didn't see anything odd.

    However, with this method the focus switches to 1Password mini as soon as it displays, unlike the other times where 1Password mini is visible but focus remains on the login form.

    Which confirms that our method of focusing it works. The question is, when did it not work and how to reproduce it?

    In this case, both the login form and 1Password mini had active blinking cursors but the actual focus was on the login form.

    Which technically isn't supposed to be possible, it's handled by the OS. We have some UI glitches where we can say that Windows is telling us the wrong data, it told us the UI is focused when we can clearly type in the other window and focus it.

    There's another glitch that we found with WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, it wouldn't reset the cache of 1Password mini after it is hidden and then locked. Some of you may notice that when you invoke a locked 1Password mini, it shows something before it does the lock view.

    I have a feeling what we're seeing is a cached view that appears to be locked with a cursor in it but it is not actually real. We're trying to find a long-term solution to replace the use of WPF in 1Password mini to see if it'd help.

    I've only ever seen this happen when clicking the 1Password toolbar button in the browser.

    Yep, that confirms it is a focusing issue. When you click the 1Password icon, the focus remains in Chrome with the 1Password extension, not the running 1Password process. 1Password extension sends a call to the running 1Password process in the background and tell it to bring up its UI. That's where Windows doesn't like it, it dislikes the focusing of background process's UI that user did not invoke.

  • duncm
    duncm
    Community Member

    Hi @MikeT,

    I seem to have found a reliable way to reproduce this issue on Chrome/Firefox.

    It depends on how 1Password mini was closed the last time it was used. If it was closed by clicking outside 1Password mini so that it loses focus (and is automatically hidden) and if it is next opened by clicking on the browser toolbar, then when 1Password mini is displayed it will not gain focus.

    On the other hand, if 1Password mini closed itself (e.g. autofill, responding to Esc keystroke) then when it is next opened it will gain focus as expected.

  • Hi @duncm,

    As much as we love for that to be reproducible, I can't make it happen. These specific steps were also shared in the past and we spent many weeks trying to break it like that but we couldn't reproduce it on dozens of machines.

    Here's a GIF of me doing it right now. Do you see anything I'm doing differently from what you're doing?

  • theremin
    theremin
    Community Member

    I also experience this problem regularly with the "new and improved" 1Password extension that came with 1Password 7 for Windows. I have accidentally submitted my master password to quite a few sites now, which is a very frustrating. This is a problem that I never once experienced with the old extension.

  • Hi @theremin,

    We have seen same reports for 1Password 4 version, we use the same browser extension between 1Password 4 and 7. We also use the same tricks to focus the 1Password 4 Helper/1Password 7 mini windows.

    The only difference is switching the UI rendering technology we use to draw the interface between 1Password 4 and 7, the issue seems to happen more frequent for certain users but it doesn't happen consistently and based on the reports we get, less than 1% of our users. We can't reproduce it either.

    We're trying to find a different rendering technology with a different focusing technique but Windows does not allow these type of focusing tricks, we're very limited in what we can do to focus a hidden window.

    If you have a 1Password.com account and uses Chrome or FIrefox, you can try using 1Password X extension instead, which doesn't have this issue because it is not a native window and it is a self-contained extension that runs within Chrome.

This discussion has been closed.