1Password on Windows or Linux machine (powered by Firefox)

Who among you Mac users, still hasn’t heard of 1Password – a password manager & auto-fill app for MacOS X? Well, if you haven’t heard of it, or you’re still considering to use it – stop being ignorant and start using it! Check out this screencast to see it in action. Believe me, this is one of the best apps I encountered in my computing history (and I’m not exaggerating at all) and it is well worth of ~40 $ license price. It will safely store all your password, credit card info and web-forms and consecutively make your life on the Web much much much easier. You should think of it as a Web Wallet —, and believe me you need a Web Wallet nowadays. Btw. 1Password supports virtually all know browsers for MacOS X (except Opera). The only thing I personally miss with 1Password, is that it has no Windows cousin, which I would like to see very much, as I use Windows at my job. And that takes us to the topic of this post..

Surfing the web and searching for a solution to somehow incorporate 1Password on my Windows machine, I came across this post which explains how this is possible using 1Password iPhone sync option. Priceless! However following instructions in that post I came across some problems, which I will warn you about here:

<ul>

<li><strong>When copying 1Password bookmark from Safari to Firefox, you will encounter truncation issuses.</strong> Even direct copy from Safari to Firefox, — as described in that post —, didn't work for me. When I synced bookmarks between my Mac and Windows Firefox using Foxmarks, I was able to get 1Password page on my Windows, but login didn't work. <del datetime="2008-11-04T11:07:51+00:00">What I finally did was that I exported Safari bookmarks using "<em>File > Export Bookmarks</em>" option, manually transferred that file to my Windows machine, manually edited it using <a href="http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html">SCiTE</a>, and copied out 1Password bookmark location field to Firefox. This finally did the magic.</del> Manually transfering bookmarks described before wasn't a good solution, because the bookmark created in Firefox worked only until I restarted Firefox, after that bookmark failed me again and I wasn't able to login into 1Password page. I was however again successful avoiding this problem using a little bit different approach. What I did was that I took <em>Safari Bookmarks.html</em> file I previously exported from Safari and deleted everything before 

a href="*"
and after
/a
tags containing 1Password bookmark in the original file. Than I save this file as 1Pass.html on my TrueCrypt encrypted drive and made a bookmark in Firefox, pointing to that HTML file. Now I first have to open this 1Pass.html page using bookmark, and after that I follow 1Password link in it.

So, there is an answer to the million dollar question – “How to use 1Password on my Windows (or Linux) machine“! Using Foxmarks you may be able to half-automate this job transferring 1Password bookmark from one Firefox to another, but you You will still have to sync 1Password.app to Safari manually, and also manually transfer bookmark from Safari to Firefox. So it’s not a perfect solution, but — at least for me — the idea of having my 1Password database on my Windows machine makes it well worth. One setback is also that you can’t upgrade 1Password.app on your Mac anymore if you want to use this function (at least till we get some other and maybe better solution). Also I should warn you to consider security: make sure to use strong encryption password when you sync your 1Password database to Safari bookmark and — when using Foxmarks — keep in mind that your 1Password database will be transferred to Foxmarks sync server, prior to reaching your other Firefox copies.

— Regards, Milan