6 ms·

Switched away from 1password recently after 10 years. Open-source KeepassXC almost as good. No regrets. Every Electron app seems to want around 400MB RAM minim

Switched away from 1password recently after 10 years. Open-source KeepassXC almost as good. No regrets. Every Electron app seems to want around 400MB RAM minimum. It's not practical for too many of your day-to-day essential applications to be greedy with resources, it all adds up and not everyone has 32GB of RAM. I used Matrix chat client, Element, on Android - it's an electron app, guess what? It uses 500mb-1GB of RAM. KDE NeoChat Android used 50MB. Electron is simply not a good fit for everyone.

Dalewyn 4y ago
Electron is literally just Chrome with some window dressing, an abstraction placed upon abstractions to abstract way abstractions which abtract away abstractions that abstract the physical hardware. Seriously, any devs that use Electron rather than programming for an operating system's natively provided APIs are lazy and/or incompetent and very disrespectful of peoples' computers and time.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  In the case of 1Password it’s just greed. With so many paying customers they could definitely support native MacOS, Windows and Linux applications.
  - simongr3dal 4y ago
    And they did, pretty successfully, until a year ago.
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      as an observation, the Electron one was the first Linux client (err, sorry, read/write Linux client -- KeePassXC could/can read 1Password's .opvault format if you needed access to them for an on-call laptop)
  - roustem 4y ago
    I replied to another post earlier, hopefully it is ok to repost it here: ---- At 1Password we actually did not mind developing separately for every platform. It's been done for years. We build it for ourselves and don't mind putting extra work for better experience. However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else. Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways. The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
    - throwaway5959 4y ago
      Thanks for the response. Re-reading what I wrote I was too harsh and I apologize. In my case I preferred the more tailored to each platform aesthetic, but I can see how that variation could confuse people. Still a huge fan and recommend 1Password to friends.
      - roustem 4y ago
        Thank you <3
- Entinel 4y ago
  > Seriously, any devs that use Electron rather than programming for an operating system's natively provided APIs are lazy and/or incompetent and very disrespectful of peoples' computers and time. This is such an aggressively bad take. This is disrespectful of a lot of developers' time. Plenty of open source software I greatly enjoy wouldn't exist on Linux if it wasn't for Electron. Electron is not a choice I would make for myself but to say "if you use it you are incompetent" is just a bad take.
  - burnte 4y ago
    It's a rapid prototyping platform, releasing it as production is just bad. Releasing it as production is disrespectful to the users, so given the choice of disrespecting the users or the devs, I'd say the devs deserve it more for making user-hostile choices.
    - szundi 4y ago
      Considering the vast success of a lot of Electron based software like vscode and all others this comment seems odd.
    - trs8080 4y ago
      > It's a rapid prototyping platform Citation needed. If my competitors want to waste time and resources hiring people to create 3-4 versions of the same app for different devices/OSes, I gladly welcome it. I'll be a well established incumbent by the time they put out their MVP. If I can solve an important business need, my customers don't care if I use 120mb of RAM to do it. They certainly don't see it as "disrespectful" if I can save/make them money in the long run.
      - roustem 4y ago
        At 1Password we actually did not mind developing separately for every platform. It's been done for years. We build it for ourselves and don't mind putting extra work for better experience. However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else. Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways. The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
- biggerChris 4y ago
  Let me guess. You must be a project manager, but you spent years studying to get a computer science degree, later on started a family and decided to get a job in Human Resources.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >You must be a project manager, Nope. :V >but you spent years studying to get a computer science degree Nope. :V >later on started a family Nope. :V >decided to get a job in Human Resources. Nope. :V I'm just a stereotypical self-taught computer nerd of the 90s and early 2000s who saw how lean and effective software of yore were and yearn for those days. Seriously, we have mundane access to tens and even hundreds of GB of RAM and 5GHz of CPU and what do we use it all for? To try and keep the stuff in the background happy, usually Windows or Chrome in this day and age. The better hardware becomes, the worse software becomes to waste the hardware even harder. Fuck this noise, I want my childhood computers of badassitude back.
    - biggerChris 4y ago
      Nice. I was wrong. Comment read like a project manager. You should apply for jobs in Human Resources. Your emails will definitely make that 18 year old developers work 2x to deliver.
  - yreg 4y ago
    A project manager might be more sympathetic in understanding/accepting the value a single crossplatform app brings to the design and development teams. (Of course at a cost.)
- throwaway67743 4y ago
  Except people who do electron well actually do it well and the experience is pleasant (Vs code, slack.. mostly) - but in general electron apps are pretty bad I'd agree on that front, perhaps a little on the lazy bit as a web app can pretty much just be packaged up and it'll never be a native experience plus it has all the associated ux problems web browsers do
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  Operating System API’s? Pfft, I only write in assembly.
- tester756 4y ago
  Yea, definitely people should have to put way more their free time just because some people are cheap on their RAM but there's solution even for those: fork it :) I hope the people complaining about electron are the ones that at least put money where their mouth is and donated to those projects if they do expect native versions
- MrBoomixer 4y ago
  What a naïve and narrow opinion your throwing onto other humans. There are as many reasons for anyone to use electron as there are not to. You may not value the use cases a developer may choose Electron over native solutions. It's very vary poor outlook on other people to think their lazy and incompetent. I'm sorry you hold these values but please try and get out of that toxic mentality your publicly showcasing here.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  So the abstraction right below web browser UI was the last one that's okay to use?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Imagine their surprise if we show them how much of MacOS really a WebView with window dressing...
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Those bits of macOS don’t need pointing out, they’re usually pretty obvious by way of small inconsistencies and taking an extra 0.3-0.5s to load compared to their surroundings.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        I agree, which is why I think that bikeshedding an Electron password manager is the most HN-thing I've seen in a while.
- replete 4y ago
  Electron has its benefits for sure, there are some great apps out there. It really depends on the use-case and development team. If it could sandbox a system webview like on smartphones I'm sure the resource issue would be mitigated. Non native UIs these days are almost indistinguishable from native.
- foogazi 4y ago
  Slack, VS Code both are electron apps - both are great, nothing feels lazy about them
- RobertWHurst 4y ago
  Wow what an ignorant and goofy take. No you are absolutely wrong. Laziness is not a factor. Have you ever had to develop and release an application across 5 operating systems all with different UI APIs while also offering a web based UI too? Perhaps it actually makes a lot of sense to consolidate your code base so you can focus on feature development instead of OS compatibility issues and managing many versions of your software across os targets? This is why electron is appealing. In my experience most people who dislike electron apps are speaking from ignorance. They usually have some sort of irrational prejudice against web technologies.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Convenience does not excuse inefficiencies and lack of respect for other peoples' property. Yes, writing and maintaining codebases for multiple environments is tedious, but it's part of the job description if you are providing good, solid software for more than one operating environment. If you argue it's too tedious to maintain six codebases, that is the definition of laziness and you ironically helped reaffirm my argument. Either suck it up or find a new, less demanding job. Programmers of yore managed to do it and we were all better off for it.
    - RobertWHurst 4y ago
      Are you trolling me? You must be, lol. Have you ever run a company or worked on a software team? It's a rhetorical question, it's clear that the answer is a solid no. It's not about convenience, it's about economics and getting shit done. Customers getting a product that works is better than them not getting a product because your company blew all its money trying to hire and manage six software teams, or getting a product that only works on some platforms. What a colossally bad take.
- cdelsolar 4y ago
  Are you serious?
stryan 4y ago
Element is only electon on the desktop: both Android and iOS are native clients. That's also an obscene amount of RAM usage for it; I'm in a good number of rooms and I think mine idles at around 50MB and according to Android maxes out at around 250MB.
- throwaway67743 4y ago
  Irony being, electron element would be a huge improvement over the current disaster that is the android client (purely on a ram/performance basis, ignoring the horrific security problems which are ignored time and time again)
- ShowalkKama 4y ago
  that's even more bizzare given the size (~45M) and performance
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
enticingturtle 4y ago
Unused ram is wasted ram. Swap speeds and intelligent swap logic are fantastic these days (especially on macOS). It’s a good thing to see programs using more ram. Better caching is a feature, not a bug.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  You misunderstand what this RAM is being used for: this is anonymous memory that's basically being wasted, not disk cache.
  - enticingturtle 4y ago
    It holds a Chrome runtime, no? Features like the fastest JIT in the world and a universal DOM aren’t waste. Not to mention, Chrome can run on much less ram if that’s all there is. It only has a high memory footprint when the OS allocates it unused memory.
    - cpuguy83 4y ago
      It's really not cool when you have 10 apps all with their own version of chrome running.
    - einherjae 4y ago
      It is waste if you could do the same thing without a full chrome instance. Because then that memory could be used for something entirely else, like the silly chrome instance required by some other electron based app…
    - grosswait 4y ago
      Not true from my own observations. It takes the RAM it wants/needs regardless of memory pressure. There is no such thing as unused RAM after a decent amount of uptime on any mainstream operating system running defaults anymore. If no application has requested it, RAM will get used as file system cache which speeds up the experience in general.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
radiojasper 4y ago
My 1p v8 uses 120MB when opened and unlocked on windows 10, divided over 4 processes. I have 32GB of RAM, that 120MB will fit somewhere I'm sure of it. Also I don't think the Windows app is an Electron app? I'm not sure how to see it but it feels very native to me. Do you think they have a native Windows app but an Electron mac app?
- bdougherty 4y ago
  No, all the desktop apps are the same Electron app.
  - radiojasper 4y ago
    Well in that case they sure as heck did wonders in optimising the app for low RAM usage. When I compare this to the dreadful Adobe CC app (also an Electron app) this one uses way less. Also feels rather speedy in use and doesn't crash when I shut down my PC - like the Adobe CC app.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  Yeah this is simply FUD—I'm seeing 118MB myself and that's with a decade worth of passwords and other info in there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gerdesj 4y ago
Bear in mind that a keepass database can be read by quite a few apps these days. You and I both use KeepassXC but there is of course Keepass itself (which I also use) and a fair few mobile apps too. KPXC looks absolutely lovely but for me it lacks one feature: fold up the tree in one click. This sounds a bit naff but: We have a KPDBX that is used by several people concurrently - mostly Windows via a drive letter, so direct access. One or two use it via a local clone that they sync remotely back to our central copy. One of those insists on ignoring the tree structure and searching instead, causing the tree to expand somewhat, and then syncing that state back via their "save". I found a plugin for my Windows sporting colleagues that folds the tree back up on open, also KP has a right click option to recursively open or close the tree. KPCX does not have either option and I generally prefer to find an entry by browsing to it. Not all people work the same way: some open so many tabs on so many browsers that their machine eventually crashes, and they leave KP in a right old state. Others close tabs when their title is occluded or the tab is no longer needed (you can always reopen closed tab). Some leave RDP sessions open for ever on every box ever and some don't. Anyway, you get the idea!
- replete 4y ago
  Thanks for the info. I just need browser integrations to work and for it to be open source, I was pretty surprised how well the autofill works on Android. No way am I putting my passwords on the cloud, that makes zero sense to me.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    It makes you entirely dependent on their cloud and vulnerable to their bugs, yeah. It's ridiculous. As a nice example of the downsides, due to a few clicks while removing a friend's trial account, 1P irrevocably deleted their data immediately. Which was not clear and was not desired. (Not a bug per se, just "wait what, heck no I didn't mean to do that / didn't know it would do that immediately and with no explanatory prompt") If they hadn't worked so hard to kill off their local backups, it would've been easy to restore access. Instead nope, and they lost quite a few customers immediately.
  - gerdesj 4y ago
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> not everyone has 32GB of RAM. Developers making desktop applications should be made to use anemic ~10 year old computers so they know what their application will feel like to common people. Builds can be done on a headless server with plentiful ram; the requirements of the build environment needn't factor into what computer a programmer is given to test their work.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Indeed. I have a circa-2008 Core 2 Duo laptop that I pull out from time to time, and I’m always shocked at how snappy it is running a modern OS relative to much more powerful modern computers, and start to wonder why I shelved it. That is, until I start browsing the web or need to use an electron app, and then it all becomes clear. It’s too bad that perfectly serviceable machines like that are being relegated to closets and trashcans due to sheer inefficiency of modern software.
  - phonepostingsux 4y ago
    > circa-2008 Core 2 Duo laptop Thinkpad X200, I'm betting. Lovely machines until you open Firefox.
- Groxx 4y ago
  One of the very best things I ever did while working on an Android app was to buy a dirt cheap phone. Every performance problem was obvious. Every fix was a clear improvement. And when things were acceptable there, the app absolutely screamed on modern phones. We had startup times faster than Android's launch animation with a little bit of care. Our users loved it.
  - gregsadetsky 4y ago
    Amen! The equivalent for web development would be to set the network throttling (two clicks in the Chrome DevTools) to the 3G preset, packet drops and all
    - 4y ago
haunter 4y ago
Windows 10, newest 1p and I see 115mb in the task manager when the app is open, unlocked, and front

Dalewyn 4y ago

Electron is literally just Chrome with some window dressing, an abstraction placed upon abstractions to abstract way abstractions which abtract away abstractions that abstract the physical hardware. Seriously, any devs that use Electron rather than programming for an operating system's natively provided APIs are lazy and/or incompetent and very disrespectful of peoples' computers and time.

throwaway5959 4y ago
In the case of 1Password it’s just greed. With so many paying customers they could definitely support native MacOS, Windows and Linux applications.
- simongr3dal 4y ago
  And they did, pretty successfully, until a year ago.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    as an observation, the Electron one was the first Linux client (err, sorry, read/write Linux client -- KeePassXC could/can read 1Password's .opvault format if you needed access to them for an on-call laptop)
- roustem 4y ago
  I replied to another post earlier, hopefully it is ok to repost it here: ---- At 1Password we actually did not mind developing separately for every platform. It's been done for years. We build it for ourselves and don't mind putting extra work for better experience. However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else. Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways. The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    Thanks for the response. Re-reading what I wrote I was too harsh and I apologize. In my case I preferred the more tailored to each platform aesthetic, but I can see how that variation could confuse people. Still a huge fan and recommend 1Password to friends.
    - roustem 4y ago
      Thank you <3
Entinel 4y ago
> Seriously, any devs that use Electron rather than programming for an operating system's natively provided APIs are lazy and/or incompetent and very disrespectful of peoples' computers and time. This is such an aggressively bad take. This is disrespectful of a lot of developers' time. Plenty of open source software I greatly enjoy wouldn't exist on Linux if it wasn't for Electron. Electron is not a choice I would make for myself but to say "if you use it you are incompetent" is just a bad take.
- burnte 4y ago
  It's a rapid prototyping platform, releasing it as production is just bad. Releasing it as production is disrespectful to the users, so given the choice of disrespecting the users or the devs, I'd say the devs deserve it more for making user-hostile choices.
  - szundi 4y ago
    Considering the vast success of a lot of Electron based software like vscode and all others this comment seems odd.
  - trs8080 4y ago
    > It's a rapid prototyping platform Citation needed. If my competitors want to waste time and resources hiring people to create 3-4 versions of the same app for different devices/OSes, I gladly welcome it. I'll be a well established incumbent by the time they put out their MVP. If I can solve an important business need, my customers don't care if I use 120mb of RAM to do it. They certainly don't see it as "disrespectful" if I can save/make them money in the long run.
    - roustem 4y ago
      At 1Password we actually did not mind developing separately for every platform. It's been done for years. We build it for ourselves and don't mind putting extra work for better experience. However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else. Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways. The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
biggerChris 4y ago
Let me guess. You must be a project manager, but you spent years studying to get a computer science degree, later on started a family and decided to get a job in Human Resources.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >You must be a project manager, Nope. :V >but you spent years studying to get a computer science degree Nope. :V >later on started a family Nope. :V >decided to get a job in Human Resources. Nope. :V I'm just a stereotypical self-taught computer nerd of the 90s and early 2000s who saw how lean and effective software of yore were and yearn for those days. Seriously, we have mundane access to tens and even hundreds of GB of RAM and 5GHz of CPU and what do we use it all for? To try and keep the stuff in the background happy, usually Windows or Chrome in this day and age. The better hardware becomes, the worse software becomes to waste the hardware even harder. Fuck this noise, I want my childhood computers of badassitude back.
  - biggerChris 4y ago
    Nice. I was wrong. Comment read like a project manager. You should apply for jobs in Human Resources. Your emails will definitely make that 18 year old developers work 2x to deliver.
- yreg 4y ago
  A project manager might be more sympathetic in understanding/accepting the value a single crossplatform app brings to the design and development teams. (Of course at a cost.)
throwaway67743 4y ago
Except people who do electron well actually do it well and the experience is pleasant (Vs code, slack.. mostly) - but in general electron apps are pretty bad I'd agree on that front, perhaps a little on the lazy bit as a web app can pretty much just be packaged up and it'll never be a native experience plus it has all the associated ux problems web browsers do
kevinventullo 4y ago
Operating System API’s? Pfft, I only write in assembly.
tester756 4y ago
Yea, definitely people should have to put way more their free time just because some people are cheap on their RAM but there's solution even for those: fork it :) I hope the people complaining about electron are the ones that at least put money where their mouth is and donated to those projects if they do expect native versions
MrBoomixer 4y ago
What a naïve and narrow opinion your throwing onto other humans. There are as many reasons for anyone to use electron as there are not to. You may not value the use cases a developer may choose Electron over native solutions. It's very vary poor outlook on other people to think their lazy and incompetent. I'm sorry you hold these values but please try and get out of that toxic mentality your publicly showcasing here.
tshaddox 4y ago
So the abstraction right below web browser UI was the last one that's okay to use?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Imagine their surprise if we show them how much of MacOS really a WebView with window dressing...
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Those bits of macOS don’t need pointing out, they’re usually pretty obvious by way of small inconsistencies and taking an extra 0.3-0.5s to load compared to their surroundings.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I agree, which is why I think that bikeshedding an Electron password manager is the most HN-thing I've seen in a while.
replete 4y ago
Electron has its benefits for sure, there are some great apps out there. It really depends on the use-case and development team. If it could sandbox a system webview like on smartphones I'm sure the resource issue would be mitigated. Non native UIs these days are almost indistinguishable from native.
foogazi 4y ago
Slack, VS Code both are electron apps - both are great, nothing feels lazy about them
RobertWHurst 4y ago
Wow what an ignorant and goofy take. No you are absolutely wrong. Laziness is not a factor. Have you ever had to develop and release an application across 5 operating systems all with different UI APIs while also offering a web based UI too? Perhaps it actually makes a lot of sense to consolidate your code base so you can focus on feature development instead of OS compatibility issues and managing many versions of your software across os targets? This is why electron is appealing. In my experience most people who dislike electron apps are speaking from ignorance. They usually have some sort of irrational prejudice against web technologies.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Convenience does not excuse inefficiencies and lack of respect for other peoples' property. Yes, writing and maintaining codebases for multiple environments is tedious, but it's part of the job description if you are providing good, solid software for more than one operating environment. If you argue it's too tedious to maintain six codebases, that is the definition of laziness and you ironically helped reaffirm my argument. Either suck it up or find a new, less demanding job. Programmers of yore managed to do it and we were all better off for it.
  - RobertWHurst 4y ago
    Are you trolling me? You must be, lol. Have you ever run a company or worked on a software team? It's a rhetorical question, it's clear that the answer is a solid no. It's not about convenience, it's about economics and getting shit done. Customers getting a product that works is better than them not getting a product because your company blew all its money trying to hire and manage six software teams, or getting a product that only works on some platforms. What a colossally bad take.
cdelsolar 4y ago
Are you serious?

stryan 4y ago

Element is only electon on the desktop: both Android and iOS are native clients. That's also an obscene amount of RAM usage for it; I'm in a good number of rooms and I think mine idles at around 50MB and according to Android maxes out at around 250MB.

throwaway67743 4y ago
Irony being, electron element would be a huge improvement over the current disaster that is the android client (purely on a ram/performance basis, ignoring the horrific security problems which are ignored time and time again)
ShowalkKama 4y ago
that's even more bizzare given the size (~45M) and performance
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

enticingturtle 4y ago

Unused ram is wasted ram. Swap speeds and intelligent swap logic are fantastic these days (especially on macOS). It’s a good thing to see programs using more ram. Better caching is a feature, not a bug.

josephcsible 4y ago
You misunderstand what this RAM is being used for: this is anonymous memory that's basically being wasted, not disk cache.
- enticingturtle 4y ago
  It holds a Chrome runtime, no? Features like the fastest JIT in the world and a universal DOM aren’t waste. Not to mention, Chrome can run on much less ram if that’s all there is. It only has a high memory footprint when the OS allocates it unused memory.
  - cpuguy83 4y ago
    It's really not cool when you have 10 apps all with their own version of chrome running.
  - einherjae 4y ago
    It is waste if you could do the same thing without a full chrome instance. Because then that memory could be used for something entirely else, like the silly chrome instance required by some other electron based app…
  - grosswait 4y ago
    Not true from my own observations. It takes the RAM it wants/needs regardless of memory pressure. There is no such thing as unused RAM after a decent amount of uptime on any mainstream operating system running defaults anymore. If no application has requested it, RAM will get used as file system cache which speeds up the experience in general.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago

radiojasper 4y ago

My 1p v8 uses 120MB when opened and unlocked on windows 10, divided over 4 processes. I have 32GB of RAM, that 120MB will fit somewhere I'm sure of it. Also I don't think the Windows app is an Electron app? I'm not sure how to see it but it feels very native to me. Do you think they have a native Windows app but an Electron mac app?

bdougherty 4y ago
No, all the desktop apps are the same Electron app.
- radiojasper 4y ago
  Well in that case they sure as heck did wonders in optimising the app for low RAM usage. When I compare this to the dreadful Adobe CC app (also an Electron app) this one uses way less. Also feels rather speedy in use and doesn't crash when I shut down my PC - like the Adobe CC app.
bin_bash 4y ago
Yeah this is simply FUD—I'm seeing 118MB myself and that's with a decade worth of passwords and other info in there.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gerdesj 4y ago

Bear in mind that a keepass database can be read by quite a few apps these days. You and I both use KeepassXC but there is of course Keepass itself (which I also use) and a fair few mobile apps too. KPXC looks absolutely lovely but for me it lacks one feature: fold up the tree in one click. This sounds a bit naff but: We have a KPDBX that is used by several people concurrently - mostly Windows via a drive letter, so direct access. One or two use it via a local clone that they sync remotely back to our central copy. One of those insists on ignoring the tree structure and searching instead, causing the tree to expand somewhat, and then syncing that state back via their "save". I found a plugin for my Windows sporting colleagues that folds the tree back up on open, also KP has a right click option to recursively open or close the tree. KPCX does not have either option and I generally prefer to find an entry by browsing to it. Not all people work the same way: some open so many tabs on so many browsers that their machine eventually crashes, and they leave KP in a right old state. Others close tabs when their title is occluded or the tab is no longer needed (you can always reopen closed tab). Some leave RDP sessions open for ever on every box ever and some don't. Anyway, you get the idea!

replete 4y ago
Thanks for the info. I just need browser integrations to work and for it to be open source, I was pretty surprised how well the autofill works on Android. No way am I putting my passwords on the cloud, that makes zero sense to me.
- Groxx 4y ago
  It makes you entirely dependent on their cloud and vulnerable to their bugs, yeah. It's ridiculous. As a nice example of the downsides, due to a few clicks while removing a friend's trial account, 1P irrevocably deleted their data immediately. Which was not clear and was not desired. (Not a bug per se, just "wait what, heck no I didn't mean to do that / didn't know it would do that immediately and with no explanatory prompt") If they hadn't worked so hard to kill off their local backups, it would've been easy to restore access. Instead nope, and they lost quite a few customers immediately.
- gerdesj 4y ago

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> not everyone has 32GB of RAM. Developers making desktop applications should be made to use anemic ~10 year old computers so they know what their application will feel like to common people. Builds can be done on a headless server with plentiful ram; the requirements of the build environment needn't factor into what computer a programmer is given to test their work.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Indeed. I have a circa-2008 Core 2 Duo laptop that I pull out from time to time, and I’m always shocked at how snappy it is running a modern OS relative to much more powerful modern computers, and start to wonder why I shelved it. That is, until I start browsing the web or need to use an electron app, and then it all becomes clear. It’s too bad that perfectly serviceable machines like that are being relegated to closets and trashcans due to sheer inefficiency of modern software.
- phonepostingsux 4y ago
  > circa-2008 Core 2 Duo laptop Thinkpad X200, I'm betting. Lovely machines until you open Firefox.
Groxx 4y ago
One of the very best things I ever did while working on an Android app was to buy a dirt cheap phone. Every performance problem was obvious. Every fix was a clear improvement. And when things were acceptable there, the app absolutely screamed on modern phones. We had startup times faster than Android's launch animation with a little bit of care. Our users loved it.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Amen! The equivalent for web development would be to set the network throttling (two clicks in the Chrome DevTools) to the 3G preset, packet drops and all
  - 4y ago

haunter 4y ago

Windows 10, newest 1p and I see 115mb in the task manager when the app is open, unlocked, and front