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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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In this case we already have a reference. Lastpass had a native mac client. It wasn’t great but it was fast and relatively light weight. Their new Electron version is borderline useless for enterprise use. It takes minutes to log in, it’s slow and the interface it flaky.

It’s not unrealistic that people will fear the same is going to happen to 1Password.

VS Code is the example that shows that you can create great Electron apps, but can you name three more?

Electron get a lot of flak, because it’s misused by webdevelopers, who thinks it will magically make them able to write good desktop app.

Microsoft also had the good fortune that few expect an IDE to be particular light weight. For what it does no one is going to care if it eats a gig or two of RAM. If my chat client or password manager does the same I’m going to be annoyed.

VS Code is the example that shows that you can create great Electron apps

I am a happy user of VS Code but it feels super slow if you use it shortly after using Qt Creator (QtCreator is written in C++).

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.

And I would say VSCode has its own annoyances but due to the fact there are few other good options (that are native Mac at least) its still praised.

Nova is a good native Mac option

I looked at it when it first came out but not since, does it have a typescript debugger yet?

Yup, via LSP just like Visual Studio Code.

There were a couple quirks in the early days but it improved at a rapid clip.

I'm not a Mac user these days, what OS features will it be missing now?

I'm actually sort of worried drag and drop won't work anymore with their menu bar pop up

Oh that's neat, I didn't even know that was a feature. (Part of why I'm asking, I'm always wondering if there's good ways to use something that I don't know about.)

Drag and drop, touchID, AppleWatch unlock, I suppose native menubar (1password mini) access might be on the table... Maybe keyboard clearing (of OTPs).. Universal clipboard?

It’s also always fun to accidentally zoom in on the entire UI of the Electron app, pushing all the toolbars off-screen. This has happened to me multiple times in nearly every Electron app I’ve used, with VS Code being the most common.

Gotcha, thanks. On Windows, Hello works, so I would hope that touchID/applewatch would as well. TIL about drag and drop. Neat!

If they drop touch ID/watch then idk what I'll do. Those are the best features IMO

Touch ID, Apple Watch unlock, drag and drop, and universal clipboard support all still work on 1Password 8 (just tried it out).

It's almost like they have a native Rust backend that makes it possible for them to still use platform-specific features like that...

VS Code is a heavyweight. It is almost a full IDE, handling hundreds of files, doing a lot of complex things, including laying out documents and networking, things that browsers are good at. I still prefer Sublime Text for performance reasons, but overall, the overhead of using a full browser is not ridiculous.

But a password manager is supposed to be a small, unobtrusive app, something you forget unless you need a password. Not the big thing you are working with all day long.

In addition to the bait and switch comment, 1Password is an always-running app. Congrats, they just decided 1500MB of your ram is theirs now.

In my experience for most Electron apps we're talking 150MB and you're exaggerating by 10x.

This is based on what? Poorly written apps like Slack? I'm so surprised how people make blanket statements like this. I'll wait and see how performance is affected by the change before making such uninformed judgements

So Slack developed by a billion dollar company is poorly written and not fixed for years but 1Password somehow will escape all performance issues?

Slack was actually very poorly written by their own admission until they recently overhauled a lot of it. It's not particularly all that bad anymore though I don't have access to my Mac right now to check. 1Password has taken great strides so far to improve security and enhance performance in their apps and extensions. All I can say is I will wait and see rather than make baseless accusations and hyperbole

I literally don't understand the derision. Not one person in this thread has said anything about the Linux client yet everyone wants to chime in about how electron sucks and is a resource hog without an inkling of what the actual state of their client is

Slack remains poorly written, you don't need to check. 1Password says they are taking strides to enhance performance of their apps but this isn't looking great for them: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1425490443400273921

The thread seems to have actual performance metrics and some features that are missing from the new release. Yes, this is not looking great for them. Hopefully some stuff gets sorted but this does look grim. It's not too bad but 150 MB for a password manager 3x what it used to be is not great

Yeah actually, they will. The reason why Slack had all of those issues was because they kept all of their business logic in JS, which led to increased memory consumption. With 1Password, the UI is just a thin layer on top of a Rust-based core, which keeps things fast and memory-light.

Also I checked Activity Monitor on macOS. 1Password 7 uses up 120 MB of RAM. The new 1Password uses up... 50MB.

No need to wait and see. Side by side comparison here: https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1425490443400273921...

Also - they’ve publically states the new app was built using technologies none of their employees have used before so I don’t expect them to build an electron app better than anyone else.

I'm using the Windows beta, and there are 3 background process. One is using 4.5mb of RAM, one 32, and one 43.9.

For reference, using native 1Password 7 on an M1 Air, the main background app is using 190.8 MB and there's another 26 MB split across two other processes...

Is that physical or virtual memory? I know that on Windows, it reports physical, but I haven't used the Mac tooling in long enough to remember.

Physical.

Cool thanks, I figured, but wanted to make sure.

120MB of RAM here on 1Password 7. This new app is using 106MB with the exact same window open.

With the UI closed, the new app only uses 50MB of memory. They've done an excellent job on this.

Panic's Nova tried to take the native Mac OS app route and they did a fantastic job but just not as easy to extend VSC.

I hate all Electron editors as well. Sublime is so much faster to use.

A semi-common workflow for me is to just copy my entire file into a Sublime buffer, make edits there, and paste it back. Everything is so much snappier.

VS Code is very good as far as Electron apps go. It would undoubtedly be much better as a fully native app—unfortunately it probably wouldn’t exist outside of Windows.

I feel the same way about JetBrains products—I sure wish they weren’t clunky Java behemoths, but I’m really glad they run on the OS I use.

To be fair VS Code is one of the best Electron apps and its feature and support by vendors makes up for it. Heck you can use it in a browser (CodeSpaces) or connect to a remote instance via local app.

VS Code does laps around the "native" Nova editor.

Speed-wise it's not the best, but it's till reasonable.

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