by jrnkntl on 8/14/21, 8:06 AM with 89 comments
by merricksb on 8/14/21, 9:56 AM
1Password for Mac Moving to Electron – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143563 (174 points/193 comments)
1Password 8 will be subscription only and won’t support local vaults – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145247 (569 points/661 comments)
1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104134 (296 points/223 comments)
by lycopodiopsida on 8/14/21, 9:11 AM
I would argue, that the current company is only a shell of the former Agilebits, which honestly cared about users and their needs. But such is the nature of big business, it appears.
by tomduncalf on 8/14/21, 8:54 AM
The developer productivity and consistency gains of working on one codebase rather than 2 or 3 cannot be argued with, and I’m confident more and more software will be moving in this direction regardless of the opinion of (what is probably) a fairly small number of hardcore users.
However, I do agree that Electron can give a sub-optimal experience compared to a native app in many cases. React Native could potentially provide a good compromise - write your app in JS but it renders using native UI widgets, resource usage is lower because it’s just using a JS engine rather than a full browser.
It would probably be more work than Electon because each platform will have differences in how it renders, but much less work than building separate native apps.
Last time I checked on RN on MacOS (well over a year ago) it was quite immature, but with Microsoft pushing it on both Windows and Mac, it could become a realistic option soon (if it’s not already).
Not sure if there’s anything on Linux? You could maybe fall back to Electron, with the the UI rendered via react-native-web to turn it back to HTML.
by numair on 8/14/21, 9:41 AM
And no, this isn't because it's "too difficult" or whatever people want to parrot here. It's because creepy VCs like Accel have pumped tons of money into 1Password, and want to keep the expenses low, and thus the margins high, and thus the earnings as high as possible, so they can eventually float the company at a nosebleed P/E ration on those severely trimmed expenses and hyper-engineered earnings. Great for everyone except the customer, as always. The "enterprise customer" is as annoyed about this as anyone else.
Thankfully, we still live in a free market, so... Yeah, have fun trying to get renewal dollars from me while optimizing for your experience over mine, Agilebits.
by mbjdesign on 8/14/21, 8:52 AM
by tpush on 8/14/21, 9:20 AM
Plus most new apps by Apple these days are horribly bad. People say native toolkits result in better performance and features etc., but I'd take all electron apps of this world instead of Apple's absolutely garbage Music app for example. The buggiest, slowest & and least performant app I've ever seen. Worse than pretty much any cross-platform app.
But hey, at least it uses native controls?
by ksec on 8/14/21, 10:10 AM
Turns out the hate against Electron is far greater than the hype on Rust. And to the specific Mac User group, anything not written in Swift and SwiftUI are just junk.
To be fair, this is one of the best electron Apps out there in terms of resource usage. Most likely due to it being purely used as UI and nothing more. The old 1Password uses 50-60MB of memory, the new one uses ~120MB. I would argue the old one wasn't actually that memory efficient in the first place.
by Daedren on 8/14/21, 9:10 AM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 8/14/21, 9:22 AM
Being able to use it on an iPhone, Mac, Android device, or Windows box, is beyond valuable. It’s a huge selling point.
So I am not that concerned about them using a hybrid app.
The biggest concern that I have, is that the poster child for Electron apps is Slack; which I consider to be … non-optimal. I dread firing up my Slack client on Mac.
https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798?s...
by vbezhenar on 8/14/21, 10:04 AM
That’s a good lesson. Extend deadlines if necessary. Use old boring technologies. Don’t surprise users with unnecessary changes. Is it so hard.
by chrisdbanks on 8/14/21, 9:48 AM
by sylens on 8/14/21, 9:02 AM
by matjazdrolc on 8/14/21, 9:36 AM
Why? Core utilities such as file sharing and password management simply need to work all my devices. If I have to use one password manager on Mac and another on Linux, there is no point in having a password manager. It gets even more absurd with file sharing. Should I use iCloud on Mac, and OneDrive on Windows, and Samba for the Linux machine? Absolutely not! Dropbox is the clear winner as it supports all three platforms. I'm an Office 365 customer, and yet I have no use for OneDrive, since there is no reliable first-party Linux client. After getting burnt with a flaky third-party OneDrive Linux client I decided to fork over money for Dropbox.
For products like Dropbox or KeePass wide platform support has wider impact than number of computers connected from that platform. In an organization with 3 people on Linux and everyone else on Windows, support for both platforms is a strong differentiator over competing products.
by Ambroos on 8/14/21, 10:05 AM
This really is a shame. Electron apps are slowly becoming the bane of my existence. 1Password was the only native thing I still used somehow. Android Studio and Terminal are only other non-Chrome/Electron things I use. Even with 64GB of RAM it's a pain. The rendering of everything just gets slow if you have too much open on a high res monitor. Bleh.
by robbrown451 on 8/14/21, 7:50 PM
(maybe offensive is too strong word... but I think it is not a positive)
Can you imagine if the various browsers ... Firefox, Chrome, Safari, ... had the expectation that web pages would be custom tailored to behave differently in their browser? Even worse, what if they expected you to code them from scratch, poosibly in a different language, just so they could be optimal? Would that be a positive?
Or how about if different car makers thought that in all cars of their brand, the turn signal or gear shifter must be in a special position, just to differentiate the look and feel of the cars from that of other car makers? How would that be a positive for drivers?
To me, we are past the point where it should feel different to be on a different platform. I go back and forth between Windows and Mac all the time, and apps that behave identically (or nearly identically) on both are my favorites. Visual Studio Code, while far from perfect (but certainly better than the last editor I used, which was native), works identically on all of them and I like that.
The desire for things to "feel native to the platform" seems to be either 1) something that comes from the platform makers themselves, for marketing reasons, or 2) simple tribal thinking.
Electron isn't perfect (I wish it didn't require downloading an entire browser engine, but simply used the one that is already installed), but the more apps that use it, the better it will get. Browser engines themselves are getting really really good, which means that many of these electron apps can also run as a simple web page for those that don't want to install them.... and again, they work the same, which is a big plus.
by drivingmenuts on 8/14/21, 1:02 PM
by ErneX on 8/14/21, 10:02 AM
by Barrin92 on 8/14/21, 9:27 AM
Also I feel like the performance is decent at this point. For a fully featured app the difference to other frameworks is not that large any more.
by yosito on 8/14/21, 10:14 AM
by jehhjq on 8/14/21, 9:39 AM
by perryizgr8 on 8/14/21, 8:44 AM
Funny. Because by that definition Mac OS's preference app is an Electron app. Go to Keyboard -> Modifier keys. Opens a dialog window that cannot be moved.
by floatboth on 8/14/21, 9:17 AM