Electron

This discussion was created from comments split from: 1PW8 for macOS.
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Comments

  • tonilampela
    tonilampela
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Moving to Electron is big disappointment - one more instance of Chrome browser running in the background.
    I guess it is all the same to move over to 1Password X instead as everything is a web app anyway... At least I can choose to run it in Safari.

  • Hi @tonilampela

    Have you tried 1Password 8 yet? We are indeed using Electron for some elements of the app, but we’re strongly focused on delivering performance as a feature. Using Rust for the heavy lifting has enabled us to do that. I'm signed into 4 accounts and have thousands of items and am sitting at 90.5 MB of memory usage:

    The app is quite snappy and responsive for me, but we'll absolutely want to hear about any instances where that isn't the case.

    Ben

  • tonilampela
    tonilampela
    Community Member

    With electron apps there is also separate renderer process for each app. All this crap cumulatively ends up eating your RAM.
    I really hope you'd reconsider dumping one of the few A-class native Mac apps.

  • This discussion was created from comments split from: Sluggish performance.
  • @tonilampela

    On my system the renderer for 1Password is using 25 MB of RAM. As I say we'd be very interested to hear about real usage scenarios that cause performance issues.

    Ben

  • sriggins
    sriggins
    Community Member

    I am sorely disappointed in the company. I won’t be installing this, and if it means my decade long support of AgileBits is at an end, then I will figure out something.

    When you took money, you said you would be the same company. You built quality Mac and iOS experiences.

    Now you do not. You are a cross platform design-centric company. The settings screen I saw is already one example of that.

    You can spin this however, but it tells me that the money is driving you to grow in directions that are not good for any platform. Windows and Mac users will get some watered down experience that will dilute over time.

    I read you already changed the shortcut to cmd-shift-space. These kinds of changes tell me that the Mac is no longer a priority, but just one of the things the factory pumps out.

    I loved this company for how they built software worthy of my trust and Apple Design Awards. Dave assured us things would not change.

    Yet here we are. Money causes companies to not hear their customers, and we have all seen this rodeo before.

    Saddened…

  • jayg
    jayg
    Community Member

    Ugh, I admit I haven't tried the Mac version yet, but it's so depressing to hear a pretty Mac-focused company in the past is giving up and moving to Electron. Usually Electron means:

    • Weird HTML menus that can't draw outside if a window.
    • Custom widgets that don't match the OS (will buttons and menus match the system theme colors?), and get out of sync after OS upgrades.
    • Almost always modal dialogs (especially preferences).
    • Poor scrolling performance in long lists.
    • Crappy integration with utility apps like Keyboard Maestro (will it be able to find HTML "buttons"?).
    • Often need to be restarted to fix performance issues (VS Code is powerful, but can't make it through a day on hardware that's a few years old--and it's by far the best Electron app I've seen).

    Not looking forward to any of that.

  • ermonas
    ermonas
    Community Member

    This is severely disappointing. I pay for 1Password to get a native macOS experience. I am tired of Electron Frankenstein monsters. I could maybe get it if this were a free service, but it isn’t. I hope you reverse course, or allow us to stay on version 7. I really don’t or need more webapps wrappers on my computer.

  • toph
    toph
    Community Member

    Yeah, my first impressions of 1Password 8 are very disappointing. The whole thing feels like a web app — the list items that load as you scroll down, the weird modal preferences window, the strange dropdown menus, the styling that doesn't match macOS (super big UI elements, that sort of thing).

    This sucks — 1Password has always had a great Mac app. :\

  • jwells1989
    jwells1989
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Another echo of disappointment here.

    The first-class Mac client with native UI is one of the reasons I picked 1Password over competitors. Not just because of efficiency, because also because of how it looks and behaves. Like any native app, it worked as a smaller part of a bigger unified picture.

    No matter how advanced the Rust backend ↔︎ Electron layer is, the one size fits all approach to the front end is a massive compromise and feels cheap… it makes the subscription fee look start to look questionable. A large part of what I am paying for is native UI craftsmanship, and without it 1Password has a hard time standing out compared to the numerous other Electron based password managers (some of which are free).

  • Hi folks! While I'm sure other, more experienced 1Password folks will be better able to discuss specifics when it comes to design decisions, I just want to say I'm happy to pass on to our developers any issues you encounter with the app or aspects of it you find don't meet your standards.

    With that said, I'd highly recommend trying out 1Password 8 (either in Early Access, keeping in mind that it's a preview build, or the Stable version, when it comes). We set out to meet and exceed expectations here - we're a group of people extremely dedicated to privacy and security, want the apps to go fast, look good, and "just work" - so I'd be very interested to hear how the actual experience of 1Password 8 matches up to your expectations.

  • Solowalker
    Solowalker
    Community Member

    10000%. 1PW8 now feels like I'm using a web app, which is not what I've been paying for and championing for the last decade. The native experience was a main driver behind my usage. Plenty of other alternatives exist if I were fine using a "good enough" web app. I hate this. It's awful.

  • XIII
    XIII
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    We set out to meet and exceed expectations here

    I'm sure based on (past) experience many customers expect you to deliver best-in-class native Apps...

    (for example: being a 2021 Apple Design Award finalist; I wonder whether Apple will consider you ever again while using Electron)

  • XIII
    XIII
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    On my system the renderer for 1Password is using 25 MB of RAM.

    On my system (with a single account):

    • 1Password: 80 MB
    • 1Password Browser Helper: 12 MB
    • 1Password Helper: 9 MB
    • 1Password Helper (GPU): 118 MB
    • 1Password (Renderer): 49 MB

    But to be honest: I have no idea how much 1Password 7 used...

  • hirschgeweih
    hirschgeweih
    Community Member

    “The first-class Mac client with native UI is one of the reasons I picked 1Password over competitors. Not just because of efficiency, because also because of how it looks and behaves.” (jwells1989)

    This.

  • petvas
    petvas
    Community Member

    I don’t want cross platform. I want a great Mac client. The day you stop offering that is the day my subscription will get cancelled.

  • snowy
    snowy
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Tried out version 8 briefly. So I know it’s early access but all features are gone. 1Password mini particularly basically got gutted. Is there plan to add some if not almost all of the functionality back?

  • bored_electrician
    bored_electrician
    Community Member

    Honestly I couldn't care less about performance. The app now doesn't behave or look like a Mac app. It doesn't feel good to use. I don't see now how 1password differentiates itself from all the other electron password managers.

    It feels just like teams, discord, vscode. 1password used to in the same category as Nova, Things, Fantastical, Ulysses. Great native apps, with exemplary UI and UX.

  • george_perez
    george_perez
    Community Member

    Yep, just terrible all around. @XIII this is how 1Password 7 is currently behaving on my Mac, with the main app "not running" i.e. only the background app is running. No open main window.

  • BSi
    BSi
    Community Member

    I've just check 1PW 7 for comparison and it used 109 MB of RAM and utilized only 5 threads. This is with two different accounts (business & private), inside them dozens of vaults with a bit over 2000 entries, in total. In addition the 1PW 7 built-in Safari extension consumed only 17.5 MB RAM in total (1Password Extension Helper + 1Password (Safari)) and used 8 threads. Adding these two ends up in 126.5 MB RAM and 13 threads in total.

    On the very same Mac 1PW 8 consumes over 215 MB of RAM and uses overall 63 threads during the first start, when there was not a single account added to the app, meaning that it only showed the "Welcome to 1Password - Sign In" dialog and nothing else. After adding my two accounts to the app, the memory consumption has been raised to 275 MB, while the thread count did not changed noticeably. The new 1Password Safari extension (v2.0.6) consumes 176 MB of RAM and using 7 threads. These ends up together in 451 MB RAM and 70 threads in total.

    But apart from the memory usage and the thread count, the overall performance feels sluggish at best on my late 2019 MacBook Pro 16, when running natively under macOS 11.5.1. From time to time spins up the fans of my Mac, while the 1Password app end up in the top of the most energy consuming apps in the Activity Monitor. Moreover trying it out in a macOS 12 VM in Parallels, the performance is simply unbearable. I had to wait around 3 to 5 seconds(!) to see any reaction in the app when clicking on an entry in the list, even after several app restart, and OS restart, when nothing else has been running. I'm not sure what's happening in this case, but 1PW 7 performed well in the same VM.

  • jrk
    jrk
    Community Member

    This is extremely disappointing, and dramatically reduces 1Password's comparative advantage for discerning users over the many alternatives. It isn't just about performance (though resource leakage and energy inefficiency remain big issues even if individual benchmarks are "fast"), but even more about native behavior and full platform integration. Does all automation, accessibility, window management, etc. just work? I have never seen an Electron app come close, and this doesn't seem to be an exception.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Also seeing the exact same issue - 1P7 used far less system resources from what I can see. I loved using 1P so much, it really frustrates me to see it taking a step backwards by using Electron, forcing browser extensions that are needlessly bloated over the original versions etc.

  • deviantintegral
    deviantintegral
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Count me in as another decade-long customer who's disappointed in this change.

    Resource usage can be an issue, but it's certainly possible to address, like how Slack was finally able to get memory use down from multiple GB to hundreds of MB with a major engineering effort.

    However, what concerns me the most is that this indicates a product direction of breadth versus depth.

    For example, taking Slack as an example: while many users have multiple workspaces they need to join, the app has no concept of multiple windows. Like 1Password 8, even opening preferences completely blocks all chats. It's horrible if you're helping a colleague with a question on preferences! Prior chat platforms all had ways to pull channels or chats into separate windows, which Slack (like many Electron apps) completely misses out on. As well, for some reason Slack can't use the macOS spell checker, which means custom words don't carry over. Their support said it was a "limitation of the platform Slack is built on", which of course means Electron. How many of these types of issues will 1Password face with this rewrite?

    If anything, I would have expected that the direction would be more, not less native apps. Build a SwiftUI app for macOS! Build a UWP app for Windows! Build a GTK / QT / whatever is great over in Linux-land for those users. Electron should be the "escape hatch" to allow the web UX to work locally for low-use platforms, not the primary target for (what I assume still is) the primary platform.

    One more note: our team at work is planning on migrating from LastPass to something else, primarily due to UX issues. In initial discussions, 1Password was a leader due to it's great native apps on iOS and macOS, which is what most of our team uses. With this change, our evaluation will change from "a leader and challengers" to a set of equals competing very much on price, and not quality.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    100% agree @deviantintegral I know this is only EA, so I'm not panicking yet, but to be perfectly frank this could well be the difference between continuing with 1P or transitioning to the improved password manager Apple has built natively into (mac/i/iPad)os - I don't understand why a company with such a long history of macOS first Apps would descend into the dumpster fire that is Electron Apps - it is really really sad.

    At a time when Apple and Microsoft and baking more advanced password managers directly into the OS you would think 1Password and AgileBits more broadly would be concentrating on using the best technologies to build the BEST native apps for each of the respective platforms. Using Electron does not allow that.

  • NathanL
    NathanL
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Hi, just wanted to add my disappointment. I've already downloaded a few alternatives to 1Password to play around with today, despite being a user for a decade.

    RAM isn't really an issue for me, but the weird non-native feeling is. It doesn't feel like a good Mac citizen, and that makes all the talk about this being built as one feel disingenuous. Even the scrolling behaviour is off!

    I'm always on the side of biting the bullet and upgrading my apps even when they make a big change, I never stick around on old versions. And so I think I'd feel better with an alternative app altogether, as I really don't like web apps.

  • octanes_dunks
    octanes_dunks
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    My subscription was set to renew in October but I went ahead and just canceled. I was paying AgileBits for an experience and that experience is changing with v8. While it won't completely replace 1Password, Apple is upgrading the password management experience with macOS Monterey and iOS 15 and that will serve just fine for me. I was easily able to export passwords from 1Password in CSV format and import them via System Preferences.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @octanes_dunks
    "export passwords from 1Password in CSV format and import them via System Preferences."

    Does that work for TOTP as well?

  • octanes_dunks
    octanes_dunks
    Community Member

    @gussic Foolishly I didn't import mine but this Reddit comment mentions that it's possible!

  • blankspace
    blankspace
    Community Member

    Can anyone recommend a better alternative? Is bitwarden finally on par with most features?

This discussion has been closed.