Electron

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Comments

  • blankspace
    blankspace
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    I'm a developer so I have usually 2-3 browsers open. Look at the thread and ram usage of the beta ... Here I was upset about them removing local vaults. This is awful.

    Edit more issues with the electron app



    • Because it's an Electron app, I'm unable to use 1password on two desktops. Activating the quick menu jumps you to the space the Electron Renderer is on.
    • I am unable to tab down menu's
    • Touch ID doesn't automatically activate when opening 1password.
    • No local vaults
    • No icloud syncing
  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    I’m finding the same issues with the menus being unable to exit the bounds of the App. Also having the same issues regarding TouchID not automatically activating.

  • henrys
    henrys
    Community Member

    I echo everyone else's thoughts here. It's not one single problem, but the huge breadth of paper-cuts you feel when using a non-native app. A single window, dropdown being cut off, spell check not working etc. This isn't just about a few megabytes of ram being wasted, this is abandoning some of the original principals that 1Password was clearly originally founded on.

    I was forced to use LastPass by my old employer, and all those same complaints I had will now be true of 1Password. A sad day indeed.

    I won't be renewing my subscription, and will be leaving completely when version 7 of the app stops working.

  • ingorenner
    ingorenner
    Community Member

    Say NO to Electron apps

  • doetraar
    doetraar
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    There's another issue here. Dave clearly states in "https://blog.1password.com/1password-8-for-mac-is-now-in-early-access/" that: "Our new 1Password apps are built in Rust, a secure systems programming language famous for its performance and safety. 🦀" -- and stating it this way makes 1Password (and Dave) appear, at the very least, disingenuous.

    It may not say that it is using Rust exclusively, but this shift to mediocrity in the form of Electron is incredibly disheartening.

    As someone who has used 1P since it came out, and recommended it to tens of thousands of people, I feel quite let down by this Early Access preview. Abandoned.

    Please reconsider, 1Password, please listen to the concerns of the community and your macOS based advocates who want to see full integration with their native OS of choice, rather than having to settle for this bland and frustrating solution.

  • cjheng
    cjheng
    Community Member

    Just commenting to agree with the others in this thread disappointed with the use of Electron for 1Password 8 for Mac for reasons already mentioned. I'm trying to give 1P8 for Mac EA a chance but I've been getting increasingly annoyed with how it now behaves due to being an Electron app.

    I've been a user since 2008 and preferred using the standalone versions. However, I was OK with moving to a subscription due to 1Password being a great native macOS app, but now... well, if it continues down this path I guess its time to start looking into alternatives. I also use 1Password on Windows and while I appreciate that the Electron app is an improvement over the old Windows app, my main OS is macOS and having the macOS app experience worsened is not acceptable to me.

    Hopefully a native 1Password app for macOS makes a return, even if we have to put up with an Electron app interim version like what happened with Arq Backup version 6, since in that case we can at least (probably) continue to use the native 1Password 7 app in the meantime.

  • llamadata
    llamadata
    Community Member

    This is an enormous letdown.

    1Password stuck out as having the best experience on each platform, and it got so many features for free just by being native. It was responsive, intuitive, and felt at home everywhere.

    @henrys summed it up perfectly: "it's not one single problem, but the huge breadth of paper-cuts you feel when using a non-native app.

    I'll be renewing my subscription (purely because I'm not willing to suffer the headaches of migrating my family to a new password manager) but I'm exceptionally unhappy about this decision and won't be recommending it anymore. If even my non-technical partner can feel a difference, its not a good experience.

    If the goal is maintaining fewer discrete apps, then all of us would be happier if we knew this was just a stop-gap solution until, say, an eventual SwiftUI rewrite that unifies the Mac, iOS and iPadOS apps... right? Please?
    😢

  • jnd
    jnd
    Community Member

    Not much new to add, but just wanted to add my voice to the disappointment over the direction of 1Password.

    So far I've only very briefly used version 8, but it immediately seems like a regression. The look and feel of the app had taken a significant hit. The a coupe of things that stood out for me were:

    • The jankiness of the scrolling (no more rubber banding, although funnily enough the website does)
    • Non-standard ui elements (preferences pane obviously leapt out, but generally it looks and feels like a webapp).

    I've always been happy with 1password, having been using it for the last 10 years (!). One of the things that has kept me with 1Password has been that it was a native app, with the performance and look and feel that comes with it. Always put AgileBits up there with Panic as developer who understood the importance of quality Mac Apps; it's sad to see them move away from that.

    This leaves me in a bit of a bind; given the direction that 1Password is moving in I don't really want to subscribe, but there are no real native alternatives...

  • blankspace
    blankspace
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    Here’s the only thing 1Password obviously cares about

    Your move 1Password. I will not pay $60+ dollars a year for electron bloatware.

  • roustem
    edited August 2021

    Thank you for the feedback, everyone! I especially appreciate that you compared our 1Password 7 and 1Password 8 memory usage and performance.

    I am not sure it is a fair comparison because there is a lot more happening in 1Password 8, compared to the older version. The app is running as multiple processes and the frontend is designed to know as little as possible to stay secure. For example, the frontend part of the application does not even get the password value until the user clicks the "Reveal" button.

    Still, we want the app to be a good macOS citizen and will do everything we can to make it happened.

    Thanks to one of the reports today, we found that the Rust backend is using too many threads and will try to make it better.

    Don't forget, this is a very first public beta build of 1Password!

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem - thank you for confirming - but what about the other fundamental issues with the front end - the fact that menus won't extend beyond the initial render window - the delays in rendering?

    I don't really understand why you felt the need to change things so much - we pay for a great service and above all a truly native App experience, from what was formerly a Mac first company. Using Electron is a betrayal to so many of us. What on earth possessed the development team to use it? Surely anyone can see that in terms of raw functionality, it is not as 'native' as 1P7?

    I'd rather the front end knew more about the passwords themselves if it meant we could avoid this ridiculous mess of electron.

  • @gussic I haven't seen any performance issues myself, in fact the app feels faster to me compared to version 7. However, you are the second person today who mentioned the performance issues and we want to track them down. Can you tell us more about your Mac model, hopefully we could recreate it in development.

    Re: Electron. You make a good point there and I will make sure we have a good description of how we ended up here. Long story short, for over 6 months we had the internal builds with frontend in both SwiftUI and Electron and we simply couldn't get the SwiftUI version to have the same polish and performance and still ship the apps this year.

    Some people on Twitter simply dismiss the app as another "Electron" but we have more Swift code in the repository than TypeScript/React.

  • @gussic about frontend knowing more.

    The app does a lot of things you wouldn't want to have a vulnerability that could lead to access to your unencrypted data. For example, at some point, in 1Password 7 we found a problem that could lead to vulnerability while displaying the Markdown-formatted notes. The problem is fixed today but this kind of problem would have much less impact in 1Password 8.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem Thank you for the reply.

    Oh the App itself feels faster than 1P7, I don't think many are disputing that, but it is a massive resource hog in comparison. Furthermore, the new Browser extensions are also heavier than the outgoing ones - what was once lightweight, and super fast is now not the case.

    What about the issues with Electron's usability, having menus that won't display beyond the rendered window (as a post above provided screenshots for) I know these things seem little, but they are really jarring. I think we'd have all preferred less polish, but SwiftUI and taken the jankiness that might have meant. Alternatively, delaying shipping the Apps until next year would be much better, if it meant Electron was not used.

    I appreciate this may not be a typical Electron App, as twitter suggests, but you know you have a large number of proud macOS users, did you really think this change would go over well? I'd happily take a regression back to 1P7's speed if it meant we could avoid Electron at all. Please don't take this the wrong way, but using Electron is lazy, other methods might take more time and money, but they would have worked much better for us, the end user.

    RE: Mac models - 16 inch MacBook Pro (i9, 16GB RAM) and a M1 MBP with 16GB UM.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem thanks for the information about the front end. I'd posit that we'd all happily trade in markdown formatted notes if it meant we could get rid of Electron, and go back to a more native feeling App.

  • roustem
    edited August 2021

    @gussic I agree about the browser extension. I am not sure what is happening with the memory usage there, it would have to load all items in memory to decrypt them and find the matches but it feels that it is doing more than that. We'll need to debug it.

    You might be happy to give up Markdown notes but others might not :) Also, it is not just Markdown, rendering things is a complex task and it is nice to have it in a separate process.

    Re: delaying the release. It is not ideal because we also have to keep updating 1Password 7 at the same time until we have the new version available to everyone (and it still might take another year for the users to migrate). Still, we discussed the idea but there was a separate issue because the SwiftUI is limited to newer version of macOS and it means that we still need a fallback for the users on older macOS. The fact remains that the most important functionality is done in the Rust code and the frontend can be replaced when/if there is a better alternative. We'll see how far we could take the current solution.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem Re the browser issue - why step backwards then, and make it so resource hungry? Why not keep developing a lightweight BE for those who have the desktop version installed? Yes it costs more for you to do, but its better for the user (I note subscription fees haven't reduced).

    Regarding the front end again - can you please explain, on what basis do you think it is a good experience to have menus cut off by the render window? Surely no one in your team thinks that's ok? Can you please explain why, despite knowing macOS users general distaste for Electron based apps, you went ahead anyway, you must have known this wouldn't be popular, you can literally see for yourself that it is a regression in terms of UI experience?

  • @gussic I think we could make the browser extension behave better. I'd love to make you happy but at the same time I don't agree that implementing something in multiple ways is a good approach. It makes things more complex, there will be more bugs, and it will use more memory.

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem I agree with the more bugs part, but the more memory part I do not agree with. I am looking at the memory comparisons between 1P7 and the bundled safari extension, vs the new one, the new one uses significantly more memory.

    Back to the front end - can you please answer the question, re menus being cut off by the render window? Surely you can see this is not a good look, irrespective of the 'Alpha' nature of the App? My understanding is you can't fix this - menus can't extend beyond the render window?

  • @gussic 1Password 8 can show a menu, try right-clicking 😁. It is using Touch ID, native messaging, and pretty much any other technology provided by macOS. As I mentioned earlier, there is more Swift code in the repository than there is TypeScript code.

    I am not sure the regular menu would look good there. The same is true about the "All Accounts" dropdown. I understand that you do not like it to be confined by the window but scrolling might be an easier way to get to the bottom of that list 🤷‍♂️

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member

    @roustem The menu gets cut off though - it won't display outside of the bounds of the render window. To see the menu you literally have to scroll on it - it's just not a good way to have an app function.

    TouchID doesn't automatically prompt when opening, you have to click the TouchID button on the App to get it to bring up the prompt. If there is so much Swift Code, why not dump Electron, spend the time getting the Swift UI right and write it in that - I'm sure people would put up with an interface that wasn't as polished, if we knew it was for a good cause (SwiftUI) rather than effectively giving further credence that 'Electron' is the way to go when you can't get things to work the way you want them in Swift.

  • blankspace
    blankspace
    Community Member

    The menu clipping is just a result of a web render limitation. That can’t be fixed in its current state.

    Besides there are bigger issues with 1P8 I just don’t see being resolved.

    • no local vaults. I now can’t store things like encryption keys, crypto passphrases, and secrets offline. Despite being a paid customer, they’ve taken that functionality away. Having both options and being able to choose what data is uploaded to the cloud and what stays local was a keystone feature for 1P. Even if you don’t bring back the syncing. Having local vaults is so important.
    • memory issues, although they claim to be looking at that and honestly a good chunk of the memory issues COULD be analytics logging. However I don’t know. It is more likely that memory creep will happen with electrons awful GC and memory allocation. although VS code shows it is possible to make a decent electron app, it’s the only one in its class I’ve ever seen succeed.
    • No menu app, honestly if they brought back a native helper menu app I might actually ignore the other issues and resubscribe. The menu bar was 95% of my interactions and I’d settle for a native menu drop down like 1p7.
    • The app because it’s a wrapper can’t function in two desktops. Open 1P, move to another desktop space and try to open it. It’ll flip you back to the other space because it’s just a wrapper. A native menu app would solve this.

    Again I honestly applaud the devs answering questions. I’ve seen a lot of companies bury their heads.

    That being said the above issues go way past beta bugs. These are core issues I don’t think you can or will solve. It’s got nothing to do with your dedication and dev work and everything to do with your PMs and Execs thinking they know best for its users.

    1p8 was obviously designed around windows first and then brought to Mac after.

    The lack of menu support, changed shortcuts, and not working across spaces is a huge mistake windows devs do when they port windows apps to Mac.

    So I say, roustem or whoever. Prove me and everyone wrong and show us you still care about the OS that made you who you are. I don’t think it’s entitlement to say we deserve a little more care and effort and give us the polish we are asking.

    My subscription ends in 2022, I very likely won’t be turning my sub back on but who knows. Give us some of the fixes above and I can look past certain things. I don’t envy you devs right now but the only leverage we customers have is our wallet.

  • gtcaz
    gtcaz
    Community Member

    Memory usage I'm seeing for 1PW7

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    We're not talking about context menus (i.e. right click) we're talking about core App menus - like click on 'All Categories' you'll see its clipped by the render window. Saying just scroll to the bottom of it just isn't good enough - and certainly not something that would have happened 3 or 4 years ago.

    @roustem

  • @gtcaz I am not sure if I should be happy about the screenshot that makes 1Password 8 look better or be sad about what seems like a memory problem in 1Password 7 🤔

  • gussic
    gussic
    Community Member
    edited August 2021

    @roustem I wouldn't be happy - The 'new' browser extension alone is using 246.1 megabytes - so roughly 20x more?

    Edit: For clarity

  • @blankspace Happy to have you with us! Give us more time to polish things and add missing features and I think will not be disappointed.

    Re: local vaults. It is a tricky one but it is possible (not guaranteed at this point!) we might have a solution there. If you have a minute, we'd love to hear your feedback on a possible self-hosting option: https://survey.1password.com/self-host/

  • blankspace
    blankspace
    Community Member

    I understand that’s not in the pipeline but you’ve peaked my interest now.

    Give me that and my menu bar back and we’ll forget this ever happened. ;)

    I’d even be willing to keep the subscription model the same for the self hosting. Similar to how GitHub enterprise does on-prem hosting.

This discussion has been closed.