Signing back into the Community for the first time? You'll need to reset your password to access your account. Find out more.
Forum Discussion
1Password 8 - Non-native feel
Like many Mac users, I was greatly disappointed to read that 1Password is moving to Electron. I firmly believe that Electron is a bad framework for app development, and the 1Password 8 beta does not change this opinion. I’ve compiled a list of issues, as I see them. Some are endemic to Electron, while others are simply stylistic choices by the dev team. I will try to omit complaints that are purely personal preference, such as specific color usage.
- The lack of rubberband/elastic scrolling is jarring and unpleasant.
- There isn’t enough visual feedback that the window is out of focus. In particular, the “New Item” toolbar button should fade to a lighter blue when unfocused.
- Many interactions in the app do not have the animations they should, including list expansions, menu displays, checkbox toggling, and modal dialogue appear/disappear.
- Unnecessary reliance on modal dialogues is antithetical to native Mac app development. In particular, the “Preferences” and “About” windows should be … well, windows, not modal dialogues.
- It is unusual for a Mac app to have the “About” page be part of the preferences dialogue.
- When unfocused, 1PW 8 lacks hover states. In order to copy a field when the app is unfocused, you have to click into the window, then click the field again. 1PW 7 only requires a single click and properly displays hover state when unfocused.
- 1PW 8 no longer shows the number of items in a tag/category.
- There is seemingly no longer an easy way to mark or unmark an item as a favorite.
- The account name at the top of the sidebar has a disclosure triangle in the down position, indicating that clicking it will collapse the sidebar entries for that account. Instead, clicking it brings up a popover menu with various actions. (I don’t know whether this behavior is different when you have more than one account. My point is that this behavior is unusual for this type of UI element.)
- The app uses almost 2x the memory footprint of 1PW 7 and 10x(!) the idle CPU usage.
- The app is noticeably slower. Scrolling a long list introduces a delay in displaying icons that is not present in 1PW 7. Additionally, there is flicker and occasional slow loading when changing filters, vaults, and tags. (1PW 7 also has flicker at times, notably when changing login items. It’s far more prominent in 8, however.)
- There’s too much list padding. With windows of identical dimensions, 1PW 7 shows me 10.5 items; 1PW 8 shows me only 7.5.
Are these things ultimately minor? Yeah. Complaining about a preferences window becoming a modal dialogue is about as first-world a problem as you can get. At the same time, I’m paying money for this, and now it feels like I’m going to spend money on a downgrade.
1Password 8 is probably the most native-feeling and best Electron app I’ve used, but that’s like saying the McDonald’s by Disneyland is the best McDonald’s I’ve eaten at. I’ve been a 1Password user for years (I started with 1Password 3) and always held the app up as the only app I unreservedly considered worth a subscription. Now it’s pretty likely I’ll move to something else.
1Password Version: 80200056
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: macOS 11.5.1
@tomjepp:
Sadly, 1Password was pretty much the last password manager vendor actually doing native apps for desktop/laptop platforms, and that's definitely over - as staff posting on these forums don't even seem to see the issues as issues.
At least for Keepass vaults, there are various native clients, such as Strongbox.
I just wanted to circle back. I was (and still am to a lesser extent) very opposed to the choice of Electron, particularly for the macOS App.
macOS client thoughts
I will say that my early observations that the new App was significantly faster than the old one (v7) remains true - it does absolutely run rings around it. I am still very unhappy about the increased system/resource usage and believe that's fundamentally tied to your choice of Electron.The macOS App is still jarring in terms of design and the way it feels / operates compared with how the old one did, and it doesn't look pretty against other great macOS Apps out there, which is a shame because that used to be a point of pride for 1Password.
Browser extension thoughts
I understand the decision behind going with fully featured web extensions, but again I feel like this is a choice directed at saving development resources and time/money rather than focusing purely on the end user. The new extensions work fine, but again are huge resource hogs in comparison with the older desktop client dependent versions of them.I really wish you would go back to the old status quo - design a desktop dependent extension that is lighter weight - at the moment you're basically forcing two resource hogs on people (or will be when they get released as 'final') - the increased resource usage of the desktop application and the increased usage of the browsers extensions. With the use of two browsers not being uncommon this resource usage can add up.
Windows client thoughts
The Windows client is much more fitting and a clear improvement on the old version, it is just a pity it had to come to the detriment of the macOS client.Closing
I did look around, and sadly I cannot find anything that offers the same feature set and simplicity that 1Password offers. I really like being able to store passwords, software licenses, driver licenses, health insurance and the like. The user friendly nature of the editing interface is also very good.I tried the inbuilt iOS/macOS passwords feature - and to be fair it's autofill performance on sites and apps that support it is far and away superior to 1Password on Apple platforms - but i suppose that's the advantage of designing for your own platforms. Apple's browser extension for Windows just sucks - it is so slow it is almost unusable in my view. If it wasn't i'd strongly consider moving software licenses and driver licenses etc into OneDrive personal vault and using Apple for my password syncing.
I think this is a warning to 1Password in a way though, Apple is building more and more of these features into its platforms and steadily iterating on them, making them more robust and more user friendly. If they touch up a few things and add more convenient vaults for things like software licenses and the like then i can see a lot of people who are primarily Apple users moving away from 1Password.
1Password isn't expensive for what it is and I do believe some of the new features (password sharing for example) are much better than having to rely on AirDrop / SMS / Email but again other things like 'masked email' are just a plain rip off / appropriation of something Apple has already done (which for most Apple centric people is significantly cheaper than using FastMail).
I won't be leaving yet but there needs to be some serious thought given to the macOS client - the way you've implemented Electron is fast, but its a huge resource hog (particularly when coupled with the browser extension resource needs) and it is a clear regression for users that use these platforms. I understand the motive of reducing development time, and cost but on the flip side - we pay you a subscription, if you were to say prices need to increase by a few dollars a year, but we'll commit to using completely platform native technologies for the building of Apps I think that is a selling point you could use and one that many people would gladly reward you for.
gussic - thanks for the thoughtful write-up. I don't have much to add, except to note that our own Masked Email was in development well before Apple released their own implementation. I don't have any inside line to Apple's development timelines for features like this, but it seems as if these solutions were developed in parallel. That's fine; others have already followed suit, and I suspect the field will become more crowded still, as these things tend to do. But to be clear, we didn't simply see Apple's results and attempt to replicate them. :)
@Lars Thanks for the response - that is a completely fair comment re masked email, apologies.
I appreciate it is probably difficult to implement but wow it is amazing it hasn't been done in a clever way prior to you and Apple implementing it.
Have you got any plans/thoughts to expand it to other providers and not just FastMail? I'm not sure if it is technically feasible but a plugin for Office/Microsoft 365 would be absolutely incredible.
After reading about half of this thread, I've got to chime in here. I'm a digital product designer by profession and I've got to say that I absolutely LOVE the updates to 1Password 8 despite what most of the people are saying here!
Sure, it's not a "native" app, but I honestly believe Apple puts together the HIG for teams building product that honestly don't know what they're doing so that sub-par apps so they're up to a certain usability standard. I applaud teams that don't do what everyone else is doing because they want to create their OWN product rather than simply renaming labels and selecting icons within a very specific framework.
Look at some of the top players in tech who very much create their own design language and constantly, and intentionally, break Apple HIG: Tinder, Cash app, Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, Doordash, Facebook, Medium, Robinhood, just to name a few. I consider 1Password in the league of these companies.
The changes yall have made we extremely welcome. You've cleaned up the over all experience and applied a visual language that respects basic design principles and elevates the experience beyond the standard.
Just because it doesn't "rubber band" or the preference center has its own look and feel does NOT mean it's bad. It means that the 1Password team has their own views on how a great product should look and operate separate from Apples. Plus, for those complaining about things missing or performance is less than ideal, it's a BETA!
For me 1P8 is a much more enjoyable experience and I disagree with most of what has been said in this thread. Keep it up 1Password team. I can't wait to try out the assumed iOS redesign (let me know if you want private beta testers) ;)
If you are reading this...Bosses at 1password.....
This is such a bad user experience. Why ? I have been a paid use for over a decade.....Why upset your customers like this...What is the matter with you!
If this becomes the main version then I will have to leave because it isn't very usable. Electron is a non native platform. Rust ??? baffling why rust.
Another vote for cancelling my family subscription.
gussic - I know of no plans to expand to other providers at the present moment, but then I am not always the most-up on what's bubbling in the labs, so to speak. :) :+1:
I just wanted to share my feedback on 1Password 8.
Right now it uses 370 MB of RAM on my MBP (M1 Max), and, idle, it uses 6.3% of CPU...
For comparison, 1Password 7 takes 84 MB of RAM and uses, idle, 0.1% of CPU
Is this expected? Honestly I don't feel comfortable running a software that provides such "simple" functionalities but takes so much resources. If 1Password 7 is going to be deprecated I'll probably switch to the 1Password X in order to save some resources.
The problem with Electron is that 1 Electron app runs fine, two Electron apps run fine, but right now I'm running: VS Code, Slack, Linear, and 1Password 8. With an average of 300MB per app, I need 1.2GB of RAM just to run these 4 apps. Of course, that's actually way more, since VS Code takes almost 1 GB alone, Slack is at 400MB, and Linear, luckily, is "just" at 220MB...
I'm wondering if you plan to release a public SDK for the Rust backend so that third parties can write their own native UIs on top of it?
