Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, makers of 1Password

This particular solution also makes the most sense for our hosted solution. Extensions are sandboxed, so the question becomes how does the standalone vault get its data into the extension sandbox? Once it's there, how do you keep it in sync?

Sure, it's possible, but it's also incredibly fiddly for the average user. While we do talk about Linux here, the extension is still focused at the average user in most ways. So having a user drag a vault into a particular folder deep in their system or really any other solution is just going to be painful and impossible to easily keep in sync.

The extension also has a prerequisite of not relying on our native applications. So any input from that side is a no go.

The other thing with this is we would've literally had to recreate a very large portion of the standalone vault code again. On Mac for instance this code is written in Objective-C, on Windows it was written in Delphi for version 4, it's not present in 1Password 6 for Windows yet but when it does exist there it'll be in C#. Our new 1Password X extension is written in Typescript and Go. So quite literally none of our existing code carries over to this. That's a big barrier to entry.

Our focus on 1Password.com accounts really made the most sense because it can get the users data directly from the web, dump it in the sandbox where necessary, and it can be easily synced. It was also a lot easier because much of our web client's code could be shared with the new extension, so a good chunk of that work was already done.

That said, I am sorry that you aren't happy about this direction we took for the extension. It wasn't specifically done to make any users made it was to try to continue to expand the options available to users.

* Make 1Password available to two new platforms that we didn't support directly: Chrome OS and Linux
* Make it possible for users to not have to have the applications installed in order to use 1Password in their browser. This starts to lower the barrier to entry as well. Traditionally the install the app, install the extension bits have been difficult for some users, this helps alleviate that.

None of our decisions here were based on making users unhappy, it was trying to make users lives easier and introducing 1Password to more types of systems.

One of the main reasons we made 1Password.com was because it allowed us to do things that we could not do in the past. This extension is one of those things that we've wanted to do but couldn't. You're bound to see a lot more of this type of thing in the future because standalone vaults limited our options for a long time and we have a long list of features and things we've wanted to implement but couldn't do with standalone vaults. Now we have a backend that can help us make these things happen so we're working on them.

Now, I'm not saying you have to agree with our decisions, but I do hope that giving you some details will help you at least understand why we're doing this. Understanding why doesn't mean you have to agree with it, or like it even, but understanding does mean you can see it from our side too.

We know our standalone users exist, we're not ignoring them, but we have some really exciting projects that we've wanted to work on for a long time and are now able to do so. Like anyone else here on Hacker News we like to work on thing we're excited about too.

For what it's worth we haven't "moved" to a hosted model. We offer our standalone licenses to users who want them. They may not be front and center but they're there. We have also made it clear that we're offering standalone licenses for 1Password 7 for Mac and Windows, so they'll continue to be offered in the future.

And our existing extension is being worked on every day. We hope that some of the changes we've made to this extension will make their way into the extension and applications our standalone users use currently. I'm excited to see how the new 1Password X extension influences the Mac application going forward.

Anyway, I hope that helps a little. If you have questions definitely reach out. I'm happy to help however I can and again, I'm sorry if the release of this new extension has upset you. It certainly wasn't our intent.

Kyle

AgileBits