32 bit app in 2018 after being "written from the ground up".

fcar
fcar
Community Member
edited April 2023 in 1Password 7 for Windows

When is your company going to take Windows users seriously??

Apple releases some silly UI animation, the next day you guys make a beta update with it already present.

Microsoft provides a 64-bit OS since Windows XP and you have been telling everyone that 1Password 7 for Windows has been written from the ground up. I don't believe it. Why would any self-respecting developer selling an app for Windows 10 purposefully write a 32-biot application.

Totally unbelievable. I know not everyone has a 5960X or 64GB of DDR4 RAM but I do, and I'm not alone. Your app uses databases and is by far the biggest memory user as reported by Task Manager, so please do convince me as to the reason why a supposedly modern app is running on an architecture from the last decade.

Jesus wept. Absolutely SHAMEFUL.


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Comments

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    @fcar: The Jesus I'm familiar with loves apps of all kinds — 32-bit, 64-bit, 16-bit. :innocent:

    1Password 6 was a 64-bit app, but we need to use some 32-bit components, so over time it became difficult to support both, especially with .Net in involved. Otherwise there would be multiple versions to test, multiple downloads to confuse users, and update and migration issues between the two. And since we need to support Windows 7, where 32-bit is still very much a thing, it makes sense for us to stick with 32-bit for now.

    So I guess then question becomes, "Is there any particular reason we should do 64-bit?" Most of the benefits of that won't apply to 1Password, but we'll certainly move to it at some point in the future. Right now, though, the benefits of staying 32-bit outweigh those of moving to 64...and it isn't entirely feasible for us to go all-in on that anyway for the time being.

    But in all seriousness, why do you care about this bit-ness? What benefits do you imagine a 64-bit 1Password would bestow upon you? :)

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    The question is, why not.

    @fcar: Not really a question, but as I mentioned above:

    • We need to use some 32-bit components anyway.
    • Multiple versions to test, multiple downloads to confuse users, and update and migration issues between the two.
    • We need to support Windows 7, and 32-bit is needed there in many cases.
    • 1Password doesn't really benefit from going all 64-bit at this point; there are mainly drawbacks.

    Certainly that will change in the future though.

    I've noticed a speed difference on macOS after Apple adopted 64 bit across the board.

    Apple hasn't yet. :)

    I see no reason why Windows wouldn't benefit either. Also there is a speed hit when you mix libraries Vs going fully 64. I'm running your app on a i7 5960X, 8 core processor with 64GB of RAM and your app is very slow to open items, actually it's not much different than 1Password 4.6 which was horrible.

    I'm not sure why it would be slower for you than on my comparatively anemic PC. That's something worth investigating. Can you provide more details?

    Anyway, I'm not sure if you've been keeping score, but Win32 is still very prevalent. I doubt that everything else you run is 64-bit. Most apps aren't. And we have to support versions of Windows where that is used heavily (if not exclusively) because that's where our users are predominantly. AT the end of the day, 148MB also doesn't seem like very much at all. I think you're doing okay there with RAM. Also, I used the 64-bit version of Windows XP, and...I would disagree that there was really a 64-bit version of Windows XP. Almost no one could use it. :lol:

  • MikeT
    edited June 2018

    Hi @fcar,

    The question is, why not. If Apple moved their entire OS including iOS to 64 bit, and subsequently macOS developers had to adapt, surely there is a benefit to it.

    It comes at a major cost that Microsoft isn't willing to make nor a lot of developers, backward compatibility is a key factor for Windows.

    A lot of older 32-bit apps have never been updated to support 64-bit, so they won't run on iOS 12 nor the next version of macOS. VirtualBox for an example is a tool I use and it doesn't run on Mojave because it is 32-bit. In fact, many of my games will no longer run on macOS and it's making me reconsider updating macOS in the first place and I might stick with Windows entirely. Two of my family members have not updated their iOS version simply because they need the 32-bit apps for the moment.

    Visual Studio on Windows is a 32-bit program.

    Apple does not care about backward compatibility, Microsoft does.

    As a user of both Windows and macOS I've noticed a speed difference on macOS after Apple adopted 64 bit across the board.

    That would be two reasons:

    1. Apple optimized their 64-bit frameworks and left 32-bit frameworks alone. That's the tradeoff they're willing to make. It's fine for Apple, just not on Windows.
    2. ARM 64-bit ISA is not the same as X86-64, they're completely different and ARM 64-bit ISA is actually a massive improvement that is not just 64-bit related and you get benefits from running ARMv8 as 64-bit only. They've added hardware functions that speed up a lot of math-related functions.

    I have not seen any major performance increases on macOS, if anything, it's the same or worse in the past 8 years. Hopefully, Mojave will change for the better but I had to revert back to stable version because it was crashing a lot. iOS 12 Beta 1 is definitely noticeable for me and that was already a 64-bit OS, which meant 64-bit was not the reason behind the performance increases.

    There's no doubt that an optimized 64-bit app can be faster than 32-bit but only if it takes advantage of the hardware. 1Password is not one of these apps that will benefit majority from it because it's not a low level app. If anything, Microsoft can optimize .NET framework for 64-bit and 1Password can benefit from it regardless of 32-bit or 64-bit mode.

    It does come at a cost, we had 64-bit / 32-bit versions of 1Password 6, 64-bit ate up about nearly twice the memory for zero benefits.

    That isn't to say 64-bit doesn't help at all. Right now, the way 1Password is built and the way it works on Windows is nothing like 1Password on other platforms, it won't benefit for going 64-bit that much.

    your app is very slow to open items, actually it's not much different than 1Password 4.6 which was horrible.

    When is it slow to open? Is it right after unlocking 1Password?

    There are some performance issues we ran into, nothing 64-bit can fix. 1Password already parse your data very fast, in fact, so fast that the UI struggles to sync up. That's where majority of our problems are at right now. 1Password 6/7 on Windows can load data just as fast as the same 1Password app does on macOS with identical hardware but because the UI isn't yet optimized, it looks like it struggles to catch up. If you let 1Password unlock and wait a few minutes, it should settle down and work more consistently.

    If you're using Dropbox and you have a lot of items and attachments, that's an extra issue; we're doing too much of everything at the same time; syncing, backing up, reading all files including attachments and so on. Once we finish our optimizations to read only the updated files, excluding attachments and only perform one backup a day, the performance gain should be large enough that the UI no longer struggles.

    We don't have a timeframe on the optimizations but it is coming.

This discussion has been closed.