Here's why I went back to 1Password 7

@dspiewak @scred It's concerning that if Agilebits can drop the ball so drastically with respect to functionality, then its certainly credible that they could do the same with respect to security. Though that once seemed unthinkable, the release of 1Password 8 demonstrates that the adoption of a javascript platform (Electron/Rust) over Swift/SwiftUI is their new priority — despite its obvious limitations.

Having reverted to 1Password 7 I will be watching the development of 1P8 carefully, and monitoring the competition who have had a real opportunity handed to them. If 1Password 7 is forcibly retired through lack of compatibility updates, then I cannot see 1P8 being it's replacement any time soon.

Dspiewak said it best “ The vulnerability surface area has expanded from a keyhole to a vast chasm, and I don't understand why this doesn't disconcert everyone.”. — I’ve removed admin privs on all the macs in my family and we do just great with sandboxed apps from the app store, but now one of the vendors who has been a cornerstone of my family’s security for more than a decade is opening up all kinds of attack surfaces by requiring admin privs and all kinds of accessibility access in order to do some new “magic” that they can claim as unique.

@dspiewak Your security comment is spot-on.

Imagine a world where security was NOT a primary consideration when designing the future cloud-based password manager product.

Can echo a lot of the comments in here and add a few more. Similar extremely long-time 1Password user across multiple platforms.

The new browser auto-fill is sluggish, unreliable, and intrusive, particularly on less reliable internet. Among several other things, it appears that the icons are not cached locally on the device any longer, or at least the caching itself seems unreliable when the network is slow, meaning that you often get blank pop ups while the information loads. Honestly, I would prefer to disable the popups altogether and just rely on Cmd-\. The use of the accessibility toolkit to auto-fill is a significant regression in and of itself. It is massively slower and a much worse experience overall, particularly since it actually "types" the password. Particularly for longer passwords, this results in a very meaningful delay where you need to just wait before form submission. Additionally, the time between pressing Cmd-\ and when the autofill actually happens, even when 1Password is already unlocked, is at least triple what it was in 1P 7.

Universal autofill is not particularly useful. I found it helpful exactly once: when logging into the Discord application. Every other time I've tried to use it, the autofill has picked the wrong thing to fill and it has been problematic. This is particularly bad in the Terminal, where password prompts are masked, so I have no idea that it has typed the wrong thing until it submits. In practice, I'm just using the universal search the same way I did before with 1P Mini, at which point everything about it is either equal or strictly worse than before.

Auto-Fill behaves quite badly if 1Password isn't open. If the app itself isn't open, pressing the autofill keybind will actually pass all the way through to the underlying application. For example, I use Cmd-Shift-\ for autofill, and when I use this in Safari and the 1Password app was closed, it will zoom out to the tabs management screen. This is made much worse by the fact that the app seems to auto close sometimes for reasons I haven't fully determined, which is another problem I never had with any previous version.

The UI really doesn't look very good. The more native look and feel of the previous generations of applications was much, much better. Design has always been a strength of 1Password and it's really surprising to see this magnitude of regression in such a core area. It's not the worst thing, but the reduction in contrast across the board has not done any favors. Also the new New Item flow is markedly slower for users who already understand what they want to do (in most cases, add a Login). Additionally, the new UX is extremely sluggish compared to the old implementation, likely due to the fact that it is no longer a native application.

The security implications of this are… not great. Not only are you asking me to trust a JavaScript based implementation of the most security-sensitive application on my machine, but you are also asking me to give it access to the most intrusive and sensitive system control feature (Accessibility). The vulnerability surface area has expanded from a keyhole to a vast chasm, and I don't understand why this doesn't disconcert everyone.

All in all, if 1Password 8 were the current version and 1Password 7 were released today, it would be received as a significant upgrade from 8 in nearly every meaningful respect.

Can echo a lot of the comments in here and add a few more. Similar extremely long-time 1Password user across multiple platforms.

The new browser auto-fill is sluggish, unreliable, and intrusive, particularly on less reliable internet. Among several other things, it appears that the icons are not cached locally on the device any longer, or at least the caching itself seems unreliable when the network is slow, meaning that you often get blank pop ups while the information loads. Honestly, I would prefer to disable the popups altogether and just rely on Cmd-\. It also doesn't help that the popups block UI elements (e.g. submit buttons!) and are beyond useless during signup flows.

The use of the accessibility toolkit to auto-fill is a significant regression in and of itself. It is massively slower and a much worse experience overall, particularly since it actually "types" the password. Particularly for longer passwords, this results in a very meaningful delay where you need to just wait before form submission. Additionally, the time between pressing Cmd-\ and when the autofill actually happens, even when 1Password is already unlocked, is at least triple what it was in 1P 7.

Universal autofill is not particularly useful. I found it helpful exactly once: when logging into the Discord application. Every other time I've tried to use it, the autofill has picked the wrong thing to fill and it has been problematic. This is particularly bad in the Terminal, where password prompts are masked, so I have no idea that it has typed the wrong thing until it submits. In practice, I'm just using the universal search the same way I did before with 1P Mini, at which point everything about it is either equal or strictly worse than before.

Auto-Fill behaves quite badly if 1Password isn't open. If the app itself isn't open, pressing the autofill keybind will actually pass all the way through to the underlying application. For example, I use Cmd-Shift-\ for autofill, and when I use this in Safari and the 1Password app was closed, it will zoom out to the tabs management screen. This is made much worse by the fact that the app seems to auto close sometimes for reasons I haven't fully determined, which is another problem I never had with any previous version.

The UI really doesn't look very good. The more native look and feel of the previous generations of applications was much, much better. Design has always been a strength of 1Password and it's really surprising to see this magnitude of regression in such a core area. It's not the worst thing, but the reduction in contrast across the board has not done any favors. Also the new New Item flow is markedly slower for users who already understand what they want to do (in most cases, add a Login). Additionally, the new UX is extremely sluggish compared to the old implementation, likely due to the fact that it is no longer a native application.

The security implications of this are… not great. Not only are you asking me to trust a JavaScript based implementation of the most security-sensitive application on my machine, but you are also asking me to give it access to the most intrusive and sensitive system control feature (Accessibility). The vulnerability surface area has expanded from a keyhole to a vast chasm, and I don't understand why this doesn't disconcert everyone.

All in all, if 1Password 8 were the current version and 1Password 7 were released today, it would be received as a significant upgrade from 8 in nearly every meaningful respect. In fact, swapping back to 1Password 7 today after having used 8 for about two weeks, I can say that it feels like a dramatic breath of fresh air in every respect.

Something like that is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it.

Sure, Twitter is worth $44 bil--because Musk put his money where his mouth is.

6 months from now you might see him sell it for significantly less, for whatever reason. Happens all the time in the business world. Somebody tries something based on whatever information he has, and it turns out bad or something else happens forcing him to sell. Shoot, Ebay makes a fortune on things like this. It's worth only what someone is willing to pay at any given moment.

It isn't $6 billion until someone ponies up for it. That's not a value judgment on AB, that's simple fact.

adam1991 The company isn't worth $6billion "only because a bunch of random people looked at each other and declared it to be so".

By your logic Twitter isn't 'worth' $44billion, and yet that's the figure Elon Musk is said to be paying. Potential has worth, so it's not "meaningless" and Agilebits has been attracting considerable investment from parties with much greater expertise than you or I.

@abriden The company is "worth $6 billion" only because a bunch of random people looked at each other and declared it to be so for that moment in that context.

The "value" number is really meaningless. They're only worth what someone might buy them for at any moment--and that number is just a unicorn f@rt in the wind, moment by moment.

If they got caught up in "look at us, we're worth billions, we're invincible!" instead of "we have to earn it every day," that's a problem.

@abriden Thank you for your reply, I do worry if 1pass7 goes away. I just went back to 7 and all is ok again.

adam1991 Thank you for replying to my comment also. I did just go back to using 1pass7 on my Mac now. I don't mine paying 1password some money since I appreciate the app all these years and want to continue using it. Just was sad I had to say goodbye to some things in order to get a subscription I liked. Mainly the vault and how I could back it up myself. I wish 1pass8 had some feature to let us do that since I am a nut about backing things up and doesn't feel right to me I have no way to do that now.

I do understand replacing 1pass to another app is no easy task though. Sorry I complained here. Glad 1pass7 still works and is available. I also understand this change and drastic move to 1pass8 was to make it run on any system or OS. But sad how it made a mess of the macOS version. I mean the app itself still works fine, but its the other things like the safari extension which is a whole other thing now and doesn't work for me 99% of the time. Doesn't even unlock for me.

I just kept thinking with auto update on, they would fix these issues but even the Mac app store 1password for safari app hasn't been updated in 3 weeks it seems. It only has 1 star rating and so many people saying it doesn't work, won't unlock. So I don't know why it's such a problem to fix it. That would solve so much of my frustration since I'm not used to upgrading something and it being more broken than before. It would also mean I could upgrade my mom's Mac since then auto fill would work for her. When something is so broken I can't trust to let my mom use it. She will just get frustrated and go back to using the same simple password on many sites and not using 1password anymore. Not a good thing at all.

I just wish for now more could be said about 1pass7 and its status from the company. I remember being told we could keep on using it for for how long? When I went back to it, I got it from the Mac App Store so glad it was still there and the safari extension installed fine. Worked as usual but don't know why the new one never does. I could say this is such a simple thing to fix, unlocking... you would think. Like you have to unlock it to do anything with it but if you can't even do that? Since I am paying for a subscription now they are still getting my money even though I am using 1pass7 so I hope I can keep using it or that they will fix these problems with 1pass8.

adam1991 I agree that it's arrogance rather than incompetence, and the motive is money. Though as I've posted elsewhere, a one-product company with a massive injection of funds and a value in excess of $6billion does not need to be putting profit before customer satisfaction — it's going to come back and bite them.