1Password: What I Love & What I Don’t Like

I recently have been using 1Password to keep all my passwords organized. For the most part, it’s helping me to be a lot more efficient during my work, due to the fact that it makes keeping track of multiple passwords a lot more easy. I use this app with Firefox and Dropbox to make my life easy.

There is one thing that I really like about 1Password, and there is one thing that I really do not like, and the rest of my opinions seem to sit somewhere in the middle.

What are these two things I’m referring to?

What I Love About 1Password

The main thing I like about this app is that it encourages me to come up with very strong passwords for accounts that I have. This reduces chances of getting accounts hacked. This is a good thing.

Before I used 1Password, I had a hard time keeping track of hundreds of passwords. If I wanted to be able to remember a password off the top of my head, I would have to be able to use a password that I could memorize. This usually was not good for security, as I would use a password that I already had been using on other accounts, or something that was easy to remember and then therefore guess.

However, with 1Password, I basically just have to remember that one main password. The rest of my account passwords, for web sites and what not, can be as cryptic as I want them to be, and 1Password remembers them for me.

So – that is the one thing that I like the most about this app – I’m able to use very cryptic passwords for hundreds of accounts and not have to worry about referencing them or typing them in each time I need to log in. Awesome.

What I Don’t Like

For all the convenience that 1Password offers, there is one thing that I get annoyed by (especially in terms of using it with Firefox). It needs to be updated quite frequently. It seems like at least every couple days there is a moment where I need to get into a web site quickly, and I click the 1Password button to do the login.

I then get prompted to update. That’s fine I guess. I need to keep this app updated. But to update I have to close Firefox entirely, update the app, then open Firefox again. This can be pretty annoying when I’m in the middle of a task that involves having many tabs open in Firefox. There have been many times where I totally got derailed with tasks because of the fact that I had to close Firefox, update 1Password, restart Firefox, then try to get back into my groove.

This wouldn’t be an issue if 1Password didn’t update so often, but this happens a lot. Then consider that I use 1Password on 3 different computer every day, and it seems like I’m always getting derailed by update requests from 1Password.

Oh well. It’s still a pretty slick app and I’ll continue to use it. I just wish there was a more efficient and non-disruptive way to handle the frequent updates.