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Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

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

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The thing I find totally infuriating is, this strategy of decoupling the backend business logic into a performant, cross-platform Rust service seems really smart! Now that you have decoupled brains, you could put it behind a native front end, brilliant, Adobe should have done this with their Creative Suite a decade ago.

But no, they used this strategy to support a trash cross-platform frontend. Wonderful. Will be evaluating ElPass this weekend.

FWIW on Linux my 1Password is using 122MB Resident (with 37GB Virtual which is a weirdly huge amount) according to htop. It also uses about 1% of the CPU when idle according to system monitor. And according to sysprof it was in 6-10% of my machine's traces from some short samples I just took.

37GB virtual might just be a mostly-harmless convenient fiction for something like a BIBOP-style[1] allocator. I haven’t observed this with Electron apps, but WebKitGTK-based web browsers like Epiphany and Eolie do do funny things to my process list with their dozens of processes consuming 100+ GB virtual memory (in reality, address space) each.

[1]: https://foldoc.org/Big+bag+of+pages

I kind of don't understand why customer support would answer customer questions that way — Oh my, did you just a question about Electron? Because I swear you asked about our RUST BACKEND. Let's talk more about that.

They're like this when anyone asks about non subscription licenses too.

> I kind of don't understand why customer support would answer customer questions that way — Oh my, did you just a question about Electron? Because I swear you asked about our RUST BACKEND. Let's talk more about that.

I see two possibilities:

1. They were told "it was written in Rust, mention that a bunch and link this blogpost for street cred" and actually have no idea what either Rust or Electron is beyond they're "technologies."

2. It's a ham-handed attempt at distraction.

My money is on #1.

They've heard complaints about Electron since the Linux beta. They do the same thing basically when anyone asks about buying instead of subscribing. Or any of the removed sync options. It's #2.

I'm curious to see if they have finally killed off standalone.

I've been a 1Password user for years but have staunchly resisted going to their subscription model because I want my data local. It's infuriating that 1Password has steadily downplayed standalone versions to the point where it's almost impossible to find.

They have, the removal of a standalone option was also part of this announcement.

Well, crap.

I guess I'm staying on the current version for as long as possible and then considering options.

I will state for the record that I think this is mindblowingly stupid.

It may be a good idea to consider a new option unless they are explicitly planning on maintaining security updates for v7.

Its just a matter of time before the browser plugins stop working. Otherwise, the software should continue to work.

Wait, really? This seems like a buried lede.

> They have, the removal of a standalone option was also part of this announcement.

Eh? They literally show the standalone app in the Tweet this submission links to.

"standalone" as it was used in the text you quoted means "supports local vaults" (i.e., can be used without paying for a subscription). Announcement discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145247

Oh! Thank you for explaining. I'm a 1Password user, but wasn't familiar with this functionality.

I guess I'm done with 1Password, then. The thousandth cut broke this camel's back (or something like that).

Hopefully a native developer like Panic picks up the torch. iCloud Keychain is ok but it’s very limited

The standalone license was killed off a while ago, I guess a month ago.

It has been painfully admitted that they are moving to Electron. Mentioning 'It's using Rust' doesn't make it any faster or efficient since at the end of the day, it is going to be slower regardless. This tweet by a user called _cprecioso is priceless of the reaction on 1Password's move to Electron. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/_cprecioso/status/1425429383880318980

Why do you think it’s going to be slower, and in comparison to what?

> Why do you think it’s going to be slower

Have you ever used an electron app? Typically slow and laggy. Worse, your workflow is typically slower since the user don’t get any the advantages of native integration.

Yeah, just look at this atrocity: https://twitter.com/parrots/status/1425481491245670404/photo...

They didn't even bother using a real window for the app settings, they just use an Electron modal window.

You've been spamming this comment repeatedly on this thread. I don't think this is particularly deal breaking or concerning at all. Electron apps actually have no issues spawning new windows for settings and such. Here it just seems like a different design design and not a particularly egregious one. I'm really not sure what's so earth shatteringly awful about this. If you show me something that shows the app actively losing functionality because of this change I will agree that this was a bad move

Yes, I have used electron apps, often. I don't think it's possible to generalize or identify causality as you have cleaved the problem here.

> Why do you think it’s going to be slower

Electron is the explanation and it takes up CPU, RAM and Disk Space. If you are running other Electron apps, 1Password is now going to be even more slower.

> and in comparison to what?

In comparison to 1Password 7 which that is fully native vs the upcoming 1Password 8 which is sitting inside an entire browser.

Do you happen to know the footprint required in a base application of each?

They seem to know: [0]

But even through basic inspection, almost all Electron apps are always more than 120MB of disk space (After unzipping) and when run it is copied to RAM which is at least another 120MB.

Multiply that with the number of Electron apps you are currently running and you can see that it doesn't scale on the limited resources of your own machine. Especially if the user is primarily using Chrome with tons of tabs open.

[0] https://scl.utah.edu/pdf/mac_mgrs/20200617_mm/20200617_mm_el...

I agree that moving to Electron is not a guarantee that an application will be slower than it is before. Unfortunately, though, I tried it out and 1Password 8 is laggy — noticeably, awkwardly laggy — compared to 1Password 7. I wrote up my experience in the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147305

Uhm... each of those tweets links to the same article that states they use Electron:

Finally we bundled everything using Electron to allow us to integrate deeply with the operating system.

In addition to not answering the simple question in the tweet, they linked to an article about the Linux app, which in no way clarifies whether the Mac app uses the same UI framework.

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.

It's like talking to an estate agent (realtor in the US).

Not surprising, considering how badly 1Password handled the removal of dropbox vaults back in 2017 or so.

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