1Password 8 Mac Electron App Experiment

thanks @"jack.platten" for the answer; when you're mentioning that

The changes to search were made to improve search behavior for international languages.

do you have any document I can be referred to as how having another surface is improving the search behaviour for international languages? I'm struggling to see how this is better and I'm curious to know the logic behind this change

We recommend using the same account password across any 1Password accounts you may have

woah... really? this kind of sounds like giving up on security just for the sake of working around an artificial limitation that wasn't there before... again I'm interested on the reasoning behind such change as I'm struggling to see how this is better than what we had earlier with 1password 7 :/

Hi @aexvir:

While the specifics of this are a bit above my head, this was a reference I was pointed to:

All sorts of things you can get wrong in Unicode, and why

As I mentioned above, we do have plans to improve search even more, but I can't share more specifics at this time.

As for the discussion of account passwords, our Principal Security Architect, @jpgoldberg, has written a much better summary of how this makes more sense and makes it obvious what information unlocks with what account password:

Suppose Patty has two accounts. One of them is her personal account and the other is with her job at the DIA (Dog Intelligence Agency). Patty does not want account PW unlocked most of the time, but she does want PP unlocked most of the time. In particular, she doesn't want the unlocking of the two accounts in lockstep. (All puns intended.) So. what does she do? She sets up a different account password for each. (Many of my examples involve my dogs Patty and Molly.)

Molly, on the other hand (paw) has a personal account, MP, and a work account, MW. She wants to unlock both with a single account password. If you (or Molly) want to unlock two accounts using a single account password it makes most sense to set the same account password for both of those accounts. This is what I meant when I said the new system makes more sense.

Suppose also that the DIA (not being as intelligent as their name claims) insists that account passwords be changed every two dog years. (Or every four months). If Patty always unlocks her work account with her personal account password she is certainly violating the intent of her employer's policy. Probably the letter of it as well. This is just one of the ways in which Patty may want to need different account password practices for her different accounts. She most certainly does not want to change her personal account password every few months.

Molly wants her account unlocking to be in lockstep with each other. The most natural and semantically coherent way to achieve that is to have the same account password for those accounts she wants to unlock as a group.

The old system

In the old system, there was a little known and poorly understood concept of "primary account." It would, on your own disk, have encrypted secrets needed to unlock other accounts. Your primary account was rarely something a user chose for that purpose, but instead was a consequence of the order in which they set up their accounts on that device. It was fairly arbitrary which account became the primary.

One difficulty with the lack of transparency to the user about what account password was unlocking what is that users could forget that they even had a different account password for their non-primary accounts. Forgetting you have a separate password for an account is a good way to forget that password. Suppose Molly was using the old system. She regularly unlocked both her accounts with the password for her primary account on her computer. Note that "primary" may not mean the one that has the information that Molly needs the most. It just happens to be the one that she set up first on that device. She is never prompted for the account password for the "secondary" account (which might contain the most important data for her). She forgets that secondary account password and she forgets that she even has a different password for that account.

Now suppose the nefarious Mr Talk (the neighbor's cat) steals Molly's computer, and there is no way for Molly to get it back from him. Molly also doesn't have good back ups. So now Molly needs to set things up on a new computer. She does have her Secret Keys for both accounts safely stored for such an event, but she doesn't have the passwords written down because she is supposed to remember them. She can set up her new computer and unlock what was in her old primary account, but she has no way to unlock what was under an account password that she'd forgotten about.

This kind of problem is the result of the old system being very opaque to users. Now having a much clearer relationship between account password and the accounts it unlocks should very much reduce that problem. If you want multiple accounts to unlock when you give a single account password there is a very natural thing to do about it. You no longer have silent unlocking of accounts.

[...] Now we make it easy for people (and dogs) to have multiple accounts, and these different accounts are part of different teams and families with their own policies. So we took the opportunity to design unlocking in a way that makes sense on their own at the expense of a substantial behavior change.

Jack

@aexvir There's a whole forum thread in regards to multiple vaults and unlocking all of them, you can read it here:
https://1password.community/discussion/122614/two-accounts-now-needs-two-different-passwords-every-time-you-login#latest

For some people, a single password for each vault can work, but in a lot of instances where you must use different passwords, the changes in 1Password 8 completely break normal usage. This is a major issue that simply won't be fixed.

i've been a user since my iPhone3gs. it's the only app i willingly throw my cash at every year. it sounds like i am just a vanilla user. i have one vault. in all these years i've never tagged or organized anything. my thousands of passwords have just been thrown in there.

with that being said, i don't care if it's electron or something else. i would have liked to have seen us apple users get a native app since the apple community has showed you guys all this love through the years.

but reality and business is what it is. i've used 1P on windows. the thing that bothered me was the non-parity between windows and mac. i think, and am probably right having consistency between the platforms makes devlopment easier, maybe with electron updates and new features will come out quicker? also just as important is the look, feel, and functionality being consistent. so when you jump platforms you know it's 1P.

all i want is more ways to retrieve a password, i really want a more frictionless way to add one entry, and i want a fast search. the other features of 1P are just gravy on potatoes. we like gravy but we really know it's the potatoes are sustaining us.

i do have one teeny wish, being able to set a password style as default. i always have to change it when i make a password. we should be able to define our password style globally in preferences imo, then change it individually on creation if needed.

one more, with all the formulas for making a password available, you can generate a random password that covers just about every login requirement except mixing numbers with memorable. the other two you can get a mix or numbers, caps, special chars, and letters. it's only memorable that is lagging behind. i know, it's just a little thing. being a user since my 3gs i've had alot of time working with it, it's easy to get annoyed over that timeframe.

Hey kleerkoat

Thanks for sharing, and for taking the time to explain what is important to you. Our current push with password generation is through our implementation of Apple's password manager resources. Apple describes this as "A place for creators and users of password managers to collaborate on resources to make password management better." In practical terms what that means at the moment for 1Password users is that 1Password will suggest the strongest passwords possible that any given site can accept, as long as that site's password requirements have been added to the Apple repository. Defining a global set of rules seemingly runs contrary to this goal, as what various sites will accept can be quite different. You can still do that though, at least to some extent, if you wish.

Here are some screenshots of the options available in the password generator as it stands:

After you've made your selections, toggling the "use as default for suggestions" option will make the choices you've picked be the default. I'd recommend leaving it on "Smart Password," which is the option that takes advantage of Apple's repo, but if you prefer random or memorable that is possible as well.

I hope that helps!

Ben

I have used 1Password for a long time. I like the native solution before 1password 8, 1password 8 as a mess in election framework. I consider to switch another instead of it. As an app user and developer, I think who provide an election solution to customer just not respect the users. , I hate the election framework app which just slow and fat.

Hi objczl, I'm sorry to learn you feel that way. May I ask: have you tried 1Password 8?

It's true that some Electron apps are slow and take up lots of resources. 1Password 8, by contrast, typically takes up as much memory as the browser tab I'm writing in, it's fast, and includes features never before seen in a 1Password app (Universal Autofill, for starters - which makes use of deep integration with MacOS).

Again, I'd highly recommend you give it a try if you haven't already. If you have any specific critiques or aspects of the app you aren't satisfied with, we'll be happy to take that feedback. Let me know!

I'd like to add my 2cents to this thread saying that, to my regret, recently I found myself looking for alternatives like never before. Which is a shame. I used to love 1P and brought tens of people to it.

The user experience with 1P8 is a major step back compared to 1P7. I think many people complained/explained the different reasons why. For me, in a nutshell, it doesn't feel as slick as before and many shortcuts are just broken or a mess.

I haven't decided on the replacement yet, and I don't really want to, but it feels like just a matter of time until one of the next alternatives will stand out and the choice will be obvious.

I hope you guys address all the issues first and I drop all plans. But to be honest it feels like you should have really listened to your user base when it was still early enough to drop all the electron plans.

Hi @andrea123z, I'm sorry to learn that this has been your experience.

If you're open to it, I'd love to know what shortcuts aren't working so we can investigate that for you and prioritize fixes accordingly. Our objective, as always, is to provide you with a solution without peer - and we appreciate your feedback on how we're doing.

macOS offers a systemwide accent color configurable by the user. Please use it.

Hi all,

The system accent color is now taken into consideration in the latest nightly build of 1Password 8 for Mac (80900003). 🎉

Ben