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1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

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Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommend trying BitWarden! I'm a paying user of it myself. It also has export of data and full self-hosted options as well. The browser plugins work amazingly well. The phone app is...i would say 75-80%. I've had trouble sometimes getting it to popup the "auto-fill" but otherwise it works very slick (supporting biometric unlock too).

FWIW, my experience has been that Bitwarden's autofill is pretty bad compared to other password managers (I recently migrated from Lastpass, and used 1password in the past). I end up having to manually copy and paste a lot of passwords because the browser extension can't find the right fields.

Interesting, I've never had that issue on the browser. I HAVE noticed that if you open the plugin before the page finishes loading, it will error trying to fill the fields. In those cases I tend to just close the plugin and reopen it and it seems to work fine for me.

No idea if your experience has been different, just a thought!

Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#32
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommend trying BitWarden! I'm a paying user of it myself. It also has export of data and full self-hosted options as well. The browser plugins work amazingly well. The phone app is...i would say 75-80%. I've had trouble sometimes getting it to popup the "auto-fill" but otherwise it works very slick (supporting biometric unlock too).

Does Bitwarden's desktop application use Electron? Edit: Okay, it sounds like from the comments, it does use Electron. Then my followup question is, if people are upset with 1Password moving in this direction, then Bitwarden would not be a good alternative, no?

It is, but on the Mac, one of the big selling points of 1Password was a nice, native UI. If that feature is gone, why use it over an open-source, self-hostable alternative?

Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#33
post #5

The most disturbing part about this is that their support team has been misleading people on Twitter all morning, not truthfully answering straightforward questions about whether the app is Electron: https://twitter.com/1Password/status/1425429965747720200 https://twitter.com/1Password/status/1425470169133031435 https://twitter.com/1Password/status/1425476888072495111

I've found the support on the their support forum to be quite lacking. Often times, people not knowing the answer and making things up or not answering the question. So this seems par for the course for them.

Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#35

Could someone give a bird's eye view summary of why 1Password moving to Electron is bad? Are there documented security risks, or is it more just a UX/UI aesthetic issue?

It's popular to hate on Electron. The most common argument thrown around is "bloat". I also detect a perception among engineers that they consider Electron "the easy way out" vs. maintaining strictly native apps. Reminds me of the discourse around Sharkbite fittings on plumbing forums.

I have to wonder what percentage of 1Password users know what languages or frameworks 1Password uses, much less care what languages or frameworks it uses? I assume it must be a fraction of 1%.

Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#37
I'm somewhat baffled and amused by how much hate Electron gets on HN when an existing app moves to it or a new app uses it while at the same time whenever editors and/or IDEs are discussed Visual Studio Code (an Electron all) is massively praised.

Re: 1Password for Mac Moving to Electron

#39
post #37

I'm somewhat baffled and amused by how much hate Electron gets on HN when an existing app moves to it or a new app uses it while at the same time whenever editors and/or IDEs are discussed Visual Studio Code (an Electron all) is massively praised.

It’s pretty easy to understand.

VSCode was an electron app from day one and never tried to be a first-class Mac app while the only reason 1Password is around today is because customers loved having a lightweight, native manager that always was quick to support new OS features.

Essentially, native Mac apps switching to electron is a bait and switch.

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