Safari plugin not unlocking

Hi peter_leblond​,

I'm sharing a response I gave recently to someone having a similar experience. I want you to know that you're being heard–we have a lot of Safari users working at 1Password and we want it to work well, too!

These are fair comments and you're not the only one who has brought this up. The short version is that there are some issues with Safari and how it handles extensions that we're waiting on Apple to fix

I'll also paraphrase something 1P_Mitch​​, from our Product team, posted on our subreddit recently about the situation.

1. We feel the pain too. Lots of people at 1Password use Safari.
2. It really is the APIs. Safari supports the same extension APIs as Chrome and Firefox — and 95% of our code is shared — but reliability is the issue. One long-standing bug breaks extension communication after using the Back/Forward buttons (an extremely common workflow in a web browser!). The bug was fixed in WebKit in May (WebKit bug #292378), but still isn’t in stable Safari.
3. Silent failures result from Safari’s messaging system, which sometimes drops internal messages between extension components. That’s why sometimes nothing shows up on the page, or clicking the icon does nothing — the click is detected, but the message never reaches the other side. 1Password can’t detect or recover from this situation.
4. New features can make things worse. Safari profiles are super useful, but they are not built with extensions in mind. Unlike other browsers, Safari doesn’t let extensions run cleanly across separate profiles. Ours conflicts with itself. No workaround, no API to help.
5. Progress is uneven. Safari moves on a slower, mostly annual release cycle. Some years fix bugs; others introduce new ones that linger. The extension is less stable today than it was a year ago. We’re hoping this fall brings meaningful improvements, with some evidence (more on this below).
6. It’s not just us. We use Apple’s official extension framework. Even if we dropped support for every other platform and focused only on Safari, these bugs would still exist. They're in the system-level architecture of Safari extensions.

Is there any good news?

Yes. The messaging bug I mentioned earlier is fixed in Safari Technology Preview, and it's made a big difference. We’re thankful to the Safari and WebKit folks who acted on our reports.

And to be clear, we’re not just pointing fingers. We can and will continue improving the extension across all browsers, Safari included. Your feedback helps us know where to focus. Please keep it coming, and hold us to a high bar.

Regarding your question about frequent releases, you're right that we do release updates regularly and we consider this a good thing. It means we're squashing bugs and adding features! Our most detailed release notes are available at https://releases.1password.com/, if you want to dig into them!

I know the explanation doesn't make it any less frustrating when something doesn't work, but know that we're doing everything we can to make 1Password as good as it can be.