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Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

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.

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