Overcoming 25+ years of muscle-memory

It is certainly possible to change the Preferences window.

However, I have a few concerns:

1. Is it worth the initial investment of time? I just checked the issue tracker and there are currently 4,162 open tickets that include new features, improvements, bug fixes. Wouldn't it be wiser to invest this time in a new feature or fixing a bug?
2. Making the Preferences window different only for Mac means that it will also require on-going effort to keep it this way as the app evolves, settings are added/removed/modified, etc. Every build of 1Password that we publish will require a separate test scenario.
3. Today, our cost of writing and maintaining documentation is huge because of so many differences between the platforms. I was sad to see that many of our docs have removed the screenshots simply because it was so difficult to maintain them — I always thought that screenshots make the documentation better. One of the big advantages of 1Password 8 is being able to create a higher quality documentation that covers all platforms.

Finally, there are many popular apps that already have a very different approach.

I went through my Applications folder and launched every app to see how the Preferences are implemented. Here is a list of apps in my Mac that either do not have a floating window or do not have the traffic light controls or both. I don't have a huge selection of apps on this Mac because I just started setting it up from scratch a couple of weeks ago. Still, the list is pretty large:

• Acrobat Reader
• Brave
• Chess (comes with macOS, might be one of the oldest Mac apps?)
• Evernote
• Firefox
• GitHub Desktop
• Ishtar Commander
• Journey by Moleskine
• LanScan
• Logseq
• Microsoft Edge
• Music (comes with macOS)
• Notion
• Obsidian
• Pocket Casts
• Slack
• Spotify
• TV (comes with macOS)
• Visual Studio Code