Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Semi-related: this survey was announced alongside 1Password 8 for Windows early access. Apparently 1Password 8 for Windows uses Electron and there was some discussion about AgileBits wanting to move to the same architecture on all platforms.

Does anyone know if 1Password 8 on macOS will also be an Electron app? Their Linux Electron app is pretty good and definitely much better than having no 1Password at all. However, this would be a sad ending for what started out as a great, efficient, native Mac-only application.

I can understand why AgileBits would make this choice. For most users, Electron is probably not a big issue, if they'd notice at all. But as someone who loves native macOS apps, it just makes me sad.

View on HN

Thanks for the warning about this. I was already disappointed in the direction 1Password has been taking, and moving to Electron would certainly be the last straw. It’s totally reasonable that they want to cheap out on the actual software and expand their business into more lucrative services, but it’s not what I personally want in a password manager. So hopefully someone else, maybe a lone develop that doesn’t need perpetual growth, will make a good, standalone, native Mac password manager.

Keychain itself is getting better and more fleshed out UX, but it’s still not flexible enough to trust for everything unfortunately.

> So hopefully someone else, maybe a lone develop that doesn’t need perpetual growth, will make a good, standalone, native Mac password manager.

You may wish to look into Secrets: https://outercorner.com/secrets-mac/

Thank you so much for this recommendation! This looks like exactly what I hoped existed, basically 1Password without all of the striving to be more than an app. Also, I already have a SetApp subscription so the desktop version is effectively free.

I wasn't aware of Secrets. I will certainly look into it.

It appears to check all the boxes that 1Password used to check.

Looks like you’re looking for a reason but none of that was announced or even hinted as happening on macOS. They have one of the best Mac native app, I doubt it’s part of their plan.

Before this thread, I never considered they might deprecate the native app, but there seemed to be a lot of premonition here that it’s on the horizon.

I wasn’t actively looking to find a replacement, but I was certainly not happy to see them taking venture funding. That’s great in some contexts, but explicit pressure to grow revenue enough to support 500 people and pay back a bunch of venture capitalists isn’t very conducive to writing quality software.

Well that was fast![0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143563

I find I have to kinda budget how many electron apps I keep around, to keep things running smoothly. And that's assuming they're all halfway, sorta, well-written. That goes double for anything I might want to leave open, or open frequently. It also applies to "web app" tabs in my browser (even Gmail eats shitloads of memory and spikes CPU usage all the time for mysterious reasons, let alone things like Google Docs, and a bunch of SaaS dashboards are as bad or worse).

If an app is Electron, it gets an extra and fairly rigorous level of "do I need it? What are the alternatives?" treatment, for this reason. Native, or even QT, doesn't get that kind of in-advance scrutiny, since only rarely do they cause any problems, even if I forget about them and leave them on in the background for months.

Your focus on password manager is off.

> maybe a lone develop that doesn’t need perpetual growth, will make a good, standalone, native Mac password manager.

How do you trust this lone developer? Password manager is all about security and having a motivation to chase money has more trust than someone seemingly doing it voluntarily.

And electron app, not sure why people still complain in 2021... unless you're machine is still running with 2GB memory...

Usability is so much more important than using extra 300MB of memory being electron.

> Usability is so much more important than using extra 300MB of memory being electron.

I don't know if it's more important, but certainly, Electron apps' poor usability is another reason to avoid them.

While there are exceptions, they tend to lack usable right-click menus, use odd font sizes (everything's too big), have UI elements that behave differently from the platform standard, and, of course, lag, all of which make usability suffer.

I moved away from LastPass to 1Password as LastPass changed their app to Electron and it was immediately slower and less usable. On a 32GB RAM machine. But just things like resizing the window were worse. Not always true for Electron, but it made me change in this case.

One reason I use 1Password is because it’s a native app. Electron apps never have the affordances of the platform, so are frustrating to use whenever you leave the “happy path”. Because it’s so heavily used this would be a reason to leave it.

Separately, Electron is itself a large piece of code and integrating it would increase the attack surface — of a piece of security code! Another good reason to switch if this comes to pass.

To be fair: 1password native app on windows was horrible and felt 3 times slower than 8.0(electron) beta.

> Electron is itself a large piece of code and integrating it would increase the attack surface

At the same time, the most audited code it there. Maybe you don't use a GUI browser.

This would be a real shame. My only complaint about 1Password is occasional performance blips and slowdowns. Which seem to have been getting worse over time (along with unreliable browser integration). I can’t see how moving to electron on Mac would help that…

I have heard that Linux was the start, Windows is the next one to get the Electron treatment, and Mac is next.

But the linux 1Password program is "electron" in name only; it's actually some kind of Rust program; I'm not 100% sure how it works but it's definitely compiled with cargo.

What does Electron in name only mean? Either electron is included or it isn't. Whether you are using Rust through native bindings or through WebAssembly does not really matter does it?

90% of the functionality is written in rust components and the UI is a very slim wrapper around those APIs; it seems.

And even then it looks like the JS is WASM compiled from rust.

It’s not implemented in JavaScript/typescript is what I mean. As such it seems to be lean on my system.

If it is Electron, I don't think you can credibly call an entire Chromium instance a "very slim wrapper".

There's a chance it's using Tauri (rust) https://tauri.studio/en/ if it's truly not using Electron but a similar concept. However WASM builds in Electron would make more sense if they use the term Electron.

Link below to the behind-the-scenes article. I have no experience using the Linux app so I'm not sure of the performance but a lot of the core seems to be written in Rust compiled to WASM which is the way it's now being done for their browser extension. Personally everyone keeps cribbing about electron but I hope 1Password has found a way to make good on performance

https://dteare.medium.com/behind-the-scenes-of-1password-for...

No, it's definitely regular Electron:

    % tar ztf 1password-latest.tar.gz | grep "chrome"
    1password-8.1.1.x64/chrome-sandbox
    1password-8.1.1.x64/chrome_100_percent.pak
    1password-8.1.1.x64/chrome_200_percent.pak

yeah I'm aware it contains chrome, I mentioned that much of the functionality has been moved out and is actually implemented in rust, this is verifiable simply by running `1password --log trace`

EDIT: 168MiB resident memory on my system (just checked).

Though it malloc'd (but never used) 32G, that's worrying.

Good lord, it's like they're trying to ruin it.

Well, if 1Password switches to Electron on the Mac, then I’m not moving away from 1Password 6…

Ugh. Guess it will be time to switch password managers again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com