How to enable single vault for autofill, but all vaults for searching?

Let's say I have multiple vaults, e.g. Home, Work, Archive. How can I set up 1Password X to only show autofill suggestions on form fields for a certain vault—for example, if I'm at Home, I only want to see autofill suggestions from my Home vault—but then when I click the extension icon, I also want to be able to search through all of my vaults?

If I click the extension icon > settings cog > and then only select the Home vault in that list, then I will only see items in my Home vault when I search from the extension icon. If click the extension icon > settings cog > Settings... > and scroll all the way down and check all of my vaults, then I will see autofill suggestions for every Vault all over the web.

This feels counterintuitive and opposed to how I (and I would think most people) want to use multiple vaults. I want to be able to enable a single vault as I'm going about my day to day business at home or work and not be inundated with autofill suggestions from other vaults. But then when I do want to do a deeper search and manually go find something from another vault, I want to be able to click the extension icon and do a search of all vaults. It seems like only the inverse is possible with the way these two vault selection options work.

Also, as an aside, these two vault selection options are kind of a UX disaster. It's very confusing to have two different "All Vaults / Subvaults" selectors in different places in the browser extension, and it's not very clear how either of them will actually affect the extension's behavior. Wouldn't it make more sense to just put two Vault selectors right next to each other, and label one "Which vaults should be included in Search?" and "Which vaults should be included in Autofill Suggestions"?


1Password Version: 7.8.820
Extension Version: 2.1.3
OS Version: Windows 11 Pro

Comments

  • ag_yaron
    ag_yaron
    1Password Alumni

    Hey @theremin ,
    Thanks for taking the time to write about this.

    1Password will suggest autofilling items from every vault that is enabled (turned on) in the extension's settings page. The vault selector in the extension's window is there for filtering the extension's view, but will not affect the autofill suggestions, much like how the desktop app behaves - you can select a specific vault to view, but it will not ignore/hide results from other vaults unless you go into the app's settings and turn these other vaults off.

    To clarify:

    • The vault selector in the extension's window is for filtering the items list and search results in the extension's window only.
    • The list of accounts and vaults in the extension's settings page (at the bottom) is to determine which accounts and vaults will actually be available and accessible in the extension and its autofilling functionality.

    In your particular use case, I'd recommend you disable all vaults expect for the one you use most, and when you need anything from another vault, you can turn that vault on in the extension's settings on demand, then turn it back off when you're done.

    Most users have all vaults enabled and find it quite comfortable. I have over 10 vaults myself and having suggestions from all is quite helpful. I can arrange the order in which these suggestions are showing up by marking the ones I use the most as favorites, which is another handy tip to get what you need quicker :)
    In instances where I need to perform a screen share or a screen recording and I do not want some things to show up in it, I'll go to the extension's settings and turn off all vaults that I do not wish to reveal, then turn them back on when I'm done.

    Turning off suggestions from specific vaults should not be as easy as it is to select a certain vault from the selector in the extension's window because that would cause some users (who are not as tech savvy as you) to accidentally turn off/select specific vaults and wonder where did their login items disappear to and why isn't 1Password working and suggesting autofilling on their websites. This feature needs clear separation to make sure users don't mistakenly limit their extension and lose access to their websites.

    I hope that sheds some light on the extension's functions and their role.

  • theremin
    theremin
    Community Member
    edited October 2021

    Thanks for the response @ag_yaron.

    Right. So I can turn off certain vaults for the extension icon > search, or I can turn off certain vaults for the extension completely (which affects both search and autofill). I'm curious if you have any specific thoughts about what I said about the use cases though. You say that "most users have all vaults enabled and find it quite comfortable", but who are the users who are disabling certain vaults just from the extension search? What is the use case there? By definition, searching is usually the thing users do when they want to dig through everything and find anything matching their query. The autofill dropdown is the problematic pain point here, because there's no way to filter those suggestions. By contrast, the extension search can easily be filtered. If I search for "site name" and see 15 results, then I can keep typing "site name blah" and winnow those results down. It seems counterintuitive to me that the one you allow us to disable vaults for is the one that we already have much more power over filtering.

    You're also worried about novice users accidentally disabling vaults for the autofill dropdown, but then you're not worried about novice users disabling vaults for the extension search. If they can disable vaults in either case, novices will find a way to confuse themselves. I just think the vault selection power is being applied to the wrong thing here. By not allowing power users to disable vaults for the autofill dropdown, we're missing out on a very powerful feature that we can't easily work around. And conversely, by allowing all of us to disable vaults in the extension search, it feels like we gain... nothing? Turning vaults on and off in the extension search seems like an essentially useless feature.

    The whole reason I want to be able to control which vaults display in the autofill dropdown is because 1Password X stopped respecting the "Never display in the browser" checkbox in the first place. When I (and others) lamented the loss of this feature in the 1Password forums, we were told to move the items we didn't want to see on a daily basis to a secondary "Archive" vault. But it's just not the same. There is seemingly no way to create an item in my vaults that I can instantly and easily find by searching for it (without futzing with enabling/disabling vaults) but also not have to see on a daily basis in the autofill dropdown.

    I'll stop blathering on, since clearly this is just a case of "agree to disagree". I don't expect that I'll be able to convince you. But I just wanted to put my $0.02 out there on this issue. As a freelance web developer with dozens of clients (and dozens of client credentials in 1Password), there are so many little ways that 1Password could easily be improved, but it seems like these changes won't be implemented for fear of scaring or confusing novice users. I would really love to see something like Chrome's chrome://flags/ or Firefox's about:config page for power users to exert more control over the application. Top of my list would be allowing me to disable vaults in the autofill dropdown (or bring back support for "Never display in the browser") and resizing the extension dropdown.

  • ag_yaron
    ag_yaron
    1Password Alumni

    Hey @theremin ,
    Thanks for the detailed response!

    but who are the users who are disabling certain vaults just from the extension search? What is the use case there?

    Users who have a lot of vaults. :)
    Especially professional users, or users who are a part of a team/business account, or simply users that like to be extremely organised.

    For example, I have 4 different 1Password accounts in my extension - a personal account, a work account, a teams account and a test account.
    In every account I have ~5 vaults or so. It is oh so helpful to be able to select in which vault(s) I want to conduct a search.

    The important bit here for novice users is that the search filter is being reset every time you relaunch the browser, so even if a user accidentally selects a specific vault to search in, the next time they open their browsers it will be reset back to "All Vaults" and they will have access to all of their logins again. Granted, some more advanced users don't like that either and ask us to keep their selection regardless of the current session and new sessions, but that is currently the best way we've found to prevent novice users from getting lost.

    The autofill dropdown is the problematic pain point here, because there's no way to filter those suggestions.

    Two points of interest here:

    • In our previous update, we've accidentally limited the dropdown suggestions to 20 results. We've got a slew of reports from users asking us to fix it! Apparently users need all of their suggestions in the dropdown (we're talking about 50-100 suggestions or more!).
    • You CAN filter those suggestions! simply start typing the title of the login you need or the username of the login you need in the username field on the website you're on and it will filter the dropdown suggestions as you type! :)

    The whole reason I want to be able to control which vaults display in the autofill dropdown is because 1Password X stopped respecting the "Never display in the browser" checkbox in the first place. When I (and others) lamented the loss of this feature in the 1Password forums, we were told to move the items we didn't want to see on a daily basis to a secondary "Archive" vault. But it's just not the same. There is seemingly no way to create an item in my vaults that I can instantly and easily find by searching for it (without futzing with enabling/disabling vaults) but also not have to see on a daily basis in the autofill dropdown.

    So here's the real issue, and I'm glad we've managed to reach it.
    The "Never display in browser" option is a setting that belongs to the desktop app and therefor is not applicable to 1Password in the browser (formerly known as 1Password X). The suggestions we gave previously about moving selected items to a vault that will be turned off in the extension still stands, but there is another way that you might like better.
    Simply edit the login items you do not want to show up in autofill suggestions and remove the website's URL from them. Without a website URL, 1Password won't know to which website they belong and won't suggest them anywhere. They will still be accessible via search and you will be able to copy-paste or drag and drop the credentials into the webpage to fill it out.

    We do have an open feature request to add a "Do not display in browser" option so I will definitely add your voice there.
    Thank you again for taking the time to discuss this. Very much appreciated and your feedback is very helpful. :+1:

    ref: dev/projects/customer-feature-requests#534

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