1Password Chrome Extension: Setup, Safari and Security

You sign in to a site for the tenth time this week and think: there has to be a faster, safer way than retyping this password. The 1Password Chrome extension is one of the more established answers to that problem — a browser add-on that fills logins, generates new passwords, and stores passkeys, all synced to an account you sign into once. This guide covers installing it, setting it up on Safari, what it costs, and how its security actually works, using only what 1Password states officially as of September 2026. Along the way, we’ll point out the one thing a password manager was never built to do: protect the tabs you currently have open.

What Is the 1Password Chrome Extension?

The 1Password Chrome extension is a browser add-on that connects to your 1Password account and lets you save, generate, and autofill logins without leaving the page you’re on. It sits in your toolbar as a small icon, and once you’re signed in, it recognizes login forms and offers to fill or save them automatically.

Under the hood, it’s really a front end for your encrypted vault. The extension itself doesn’t store your data independently. It talks to 1Password’s servers (or a local vault, depending on your setup) and decrypts items only on your device. That’s a meaningful distinction if you’re comparing it to browsers’ built-in password tools, which tend to store everything locally in the browser profile with fewer cross-device options.

For most people, the appeal is speed. Instead of hunting for a password in a notes app or reusing the same one everywhere, you get a generated, unique password every time a site asks you to create an account, and 1Password remembers it so you don’t have to.

It’s worth being clear about scope, though. The extension manages credentials — usernames, passwords, passkeys, secure notes, payment cards. It has no concept of your open tabs, your browsing session, or what happens if Chrome crashes mid-afternoon with thirty tabs open. That’s a separate category of tool, and we’ll come back to it later in this guide, because it’s the gap most people don’t notice until they’ve already lost something.

Which Browsers Does the 1Password Extension Support?

1Password’s browser extension runs on Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, and Brave, according to the company’s own plan-comparison and marketing pages. That’s a fairly wide spread for a paid password manager, and it covers most people’s daily setup whether they’re on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Here’s the quick-answer version if you just want to know whether your setup is covered:

If you’re on Opera, don’t assume the extension works the same way it does on Chromium-based browsers just because Opera shares Chrome’s engine. 1Password hasn’t named it as a supported target, so treat that combination as unverified until the company says otherwise.

One more nuance: 1Password’s own support documentation separates “1Password in your browser” (the desktop extension covered here) from the mobile Safari experience on iPhone and iPad, which it describes as a related but distinct flow. If you’re setting up an iPad, expect a slightly different install path than the one below.

How Do I Install the 1Password Extension in Chrome?

You install it from the Chrome Web Store, pin it to your toolbar, then sign in — 1Password’s own instructions put “get 1Password in your browser and pin it to your toolbar” as the very first step before anything else. From there, the extension does most of the work automatically once you’re signed in and browsing normally.

If you’re managing extensions more broadly, whether that’s 1Password or a handful of others, our guide on how to add extensions to Chrome covers the general install and permissions flow, and managing Chrome extensions walks through keeping a toolbar from getting cluttered once you’ve added a few.

How Do I Set Up 1Password on Safari?

You install the same 1Password extension on Safari and sign in the same way you would on Chrome, since 1Password confirms Safari is one of its supported browsers alongside Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave. The general pattern for enabling any extension in Safari involves opening Safari’s Settings, going to the Extensions pane, and turning it on — but 1Password’s specific click path through that pane wasn’t confirmable from official sources at the time of writing, so treat the exact wording as approximate rather than a verbatim quote.

1. Install 1Password for Mac or get the extension. Depending on how you obtained 1Password, this may come bundled with the desktop app or as a standalone Safari extension.
2. Open Safari’s extension settings. Look in Safari’s Settings for the Extensions section, where installed extensions are listed with an on/off toggle.
3. Turn 1Password on. Enable it, and confirm any permission prompt Safari shows you.
4. Sign in. Use your 1Password account details to open your vault inside the browser.
5. Test it on a sign-in page. Visit a site you have saved, and confirm the extension offers to fill your credentials.

If Safari itself is new territory for you, our overview of the Safari browser covers the basics of extensions, tabs, and settings on Mac, which is a useful companion when you’re setting up any new add-on there for the first time.

Is 1Password Free, or What Does It Cost?

1Password isn’t free to keep using; it offers a 14-day free trial and then requires a paid subscription. That puts it in a different category from some competitors that keep a permanently free tier available.

Based on 1Password’s own pricing page, here’s what the paid plans look like:

If you’re comparing password managers on price alone, it’s worth knowing that not every competitor takes the same approach:

• 1Password. No permanent free tier; 14-day trial, then $2.99–$5.99/month depending on plan.
• Bitwarden. Offers “basic password management today, always free,” according to its own pricing page, with paid tiers layered on top.
• LastPass. Also lists a free plan, described by LastPass as “limited to 1 device type and basic password management features.”

If you want a closer look at either alternative, our guides to the Bitwarden Chrome extension and the LastPass Chrome extension go through setup, security, and pricing in the same detail as this one.

Trial ends automatically feel free to check dates. 1Password’s trial period is 14 days, not 30. If you’re testing it before committing to a paid plan, put a reminder on your calendar so you’re not surprised when it asks for payment details.

How Secure Is the 1Password Extension?

1Password encrypts your vault with AES-GCM-256 authenticated encryption and protects account access with a combination of your account password and a 128-bit Secret Key, according to its own security documentation. The company states plainly that “your account password is never stored alongside your 1Password data or transmitted over the network.”

That Secret Key detail is one of the more distinctive parts of 1Password’s design. Instead of relying on your account password alone to derive an encryption key, 1Password combines it with a long, randomly generated Secret Key that lives only on your devices. In practice, that means even if someone obtained your account password through a data breach elsewhere, they’d still need that key to get into anything.

1Password’s plan-comparison table also lists additional protections included on every account: “unique dual layer protection using account password and a Secret Key,” “secure remote password encrypts data in transit,” being “independently audited by third party security experts,” and “end-to-end encryption of all information in vaults (URLs, item titles, and more).”

None of this makes 1Password immune to the basics that undermine any password manager: a weak account password, a phishing page that tricks you into typing your master credentials somewhere it shouldn’t go, or a device that’s already compromised by malware. The extension is only as strong as the habits around it.

Does 1Password Support Passkeys?

Yes, 1Password lets you create, store, and use passkeys as an alternative to traditional passwords. The company describes offering a smooth passkey experience across your Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android devices, and shared vaults extend that to co-workers or family members too.

Mechanically, a passkey is a pair of cryptographic keys: a public key shared with the website you’re signing into, and a private key that 1Password says “never leaves your devices.” That’s a meaningful security upgrade over passwords, since there’s no shared secret sitting on a server somewhere that a breach could expose.

For everyday use, the experience through the Chrome extension is similar to autofilling a password: you visit a site that supports passkeys, the extension recognizes the prompt, and you confirm to sign in. No password to remember, nothing to type, and nothing that can be phished the same way a typed password can.

Passkey adoption across the web is still uneven — plenty of sites don’t support them yet, and some that do still keep a password as a fallback. If you’re weighing whether to switch a given account over, the general rule is to enable a passkey wherever it’s offered and keep 1Password managing the password as backup until the site fully commits to passkey-only sign-in.

How Do I Import My Chrome Passwords Into 1Password?

You export a CSV file from Chrome’s built-in password manager, then import it through 1Password’s desktop or mobile app. This is the documented path 1Password provides for anyone moving away from Chrome’s native storage toward its extension.

Only passwords transfer. 1Password’s own documentation is direct about this: “only passwords transfer; credit cards, addresses, and passkeys must be added manually.” Budget a few extra minutes to re-enter anything beyond plain logins.

Once the import is done, 1Password recommends cleaning up after yourself: delete the CSV file (it’s an unencrypted plain-text list of every password you just moved), then disable Chrome’s built-in password manager so the two tools don’t compete over the same login prompts. If you want the full rundown on Chrome’s own password tools first, our guide to the Chrome password manager covers finding, exporting, and checking saved passwords before you migrate anywhere.

What Happens When Chrome and 1Password Both Try to Save Passwords?

You’ll get duplicate save prompts unless you turn off Chrome’s own offer, which is a quick fix once you know where to look. Chrome’s built-in password manager doesn’t automatically step aside just because you’ve installed a third-party extension. It keeps offering to save logins on its own until you tell it otherwise.

According to Google’s own support documentation, the fix lives in Chrome’s settings: open the “More” menu (the three dots at the top right), go to “Passwords and autofill,” select “Google Password Manager,” click “Settings” on the left, and toggle off “Offer to save passwords and passkeys.” That single toggle stops Chrome’s competing save dialog so 1Password can handle the job alone.

It’s a small annoyance if you skip this step, but not a dangerous one. Worst case, you click through an extra popup every time you sign in somewhere new. Still, it’s worth the thirty seconds to disable it, especially if you’re also managing a handful of other Chrome extensions and don’t want another notification competing for your attention.

This kind of overlap is a good reminder that browser extensions, however well designed, only manage the narrow thing they’re built for. 1Password manages credentials. It has no opinion about your open tabs, your tab groups, or what happens to that half-finished research project when your laptop restarts overnight for an update.

Why a Password Manager Alone Won’t Save Your Open Tabs

A password manager protects what you log into, not what you currently have open, and that’s a gap most people only discover after losing a browsing session they cared about. 1Password, LastPass, and Bitwarden all do a genuinely good job with credentials — encrypted vaults, autofill, passkeys, cross-device sync. None of them, by design, touch your tabs.

Picture the situation: you’ve got a flight booking half-filled out in one tab, six research tabs open for a report due tomorrow, and a tab group for a project you’re not ready to close yet. Chrome crashes, or you accidentally close the window, or an update forces a restart. Your saved passwords are completely fine. Your tabs are gone, unless you’d already bookmarked every single one, which almost nobody does in the moment.

This is the exact problem BelayTab is built to solve, and it works alongside a password manager rather than competing with it. BelayTab saves your open windows as named sessions — one click, or the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + S (Cmd + Shift + S on Mac) — and automatically snapshots every open window every 5 minutes and whenever a window closes, so there’s always a recent copy to fall back on. Tab groups, names, colors, pinned tabs, and order are all preserved.

It’s free, with no account required and no limits on sessions or tabs, and it never reads page content, so there’s no overlap with what a password manager already handles under the hood — BelayTab only asks for permissions related to tabs, tab groups, sessions, and storage. If you want to see exactly how the automatic side works, the page on automatic snapshots breaks down the timing and what gets kept, and the Recovery screen is where snapshots, deleted sessions, and your browser’s own recently closed windows all show up in one place.

Passwords secured, tabs unprotected. If you’ve already set up 1Password, Bitwarden, or LastPass, you’ve solved the credentials half of browser safety. BelayTab covers the other half for free — install it from the download page and never worry about a crashed window taking a day’s worth of tabs with it.

Pairing a password manager with a tab manager isn’t overkill. It’s just covering both halves of what goes wrong on a bad day: forgotten credentials and lost sessions are two completely different failure modes, and neither tool fixes the other’s job. If tab overload rather than tab loss is your bigger daily problem, our guide on too many tabs has more on organizing rather than just recovering what you already have open.

Which Browsers Get You the Widest Coverage?

Chrome and Safari on Mac give you the most complete combination of 1Password’s extension and a mature tab-management setup, since both are officially supported by 1Password and by most session tools built for daily use. Edge and Brave, being Chromium-based like Chrome, tend to offer the same extension behavior with minor interface differences.

Firefox is also officially supported by 1Password, though its extension ecosystem and settings menus differ enough from Chromium browsers that some steps (particularly around pinning icons and permission prompts) will look slightly different. If Firefox is your daily browser, it’s worth checking Firefox directly for browser-specific quirks before assuming every Chrome instruction applies word for word.

Here’s a practical way to think about which combination fits your setup, depending on what you’re optimizing for:

Whichever browser you land on, the password manager and the tab manager you pair with it are separate decisions. You can run 1Password on Chrome and still use a dedicated tool for session recovery, and the two won’t conflict, since they touch completely different parts of your browsing data.

Should You Install 1Password, or Look at Alternatives First?

Install 1Password if you want a mature, widely supported extension with strong documented encryption and full passkey support, and you’re comfortable paying for it after the trial ends. It’s a solid, well-established choice, particularly if you’re already inclined toward the Secret Key model rather than relying on a master password by itself.

If cost is the deciding factor, it’s worth comparing free alternatives before committing. Bitwarden keeps a genuinely free tier with unlimited passwords and devices, and its documentation states it uses zero-knowledge encryption where “Bitwarden team members can’t see your vault data.” LastPass also offers a free plan, though it’s limited to one device type. Neither free tier matches 1Password’s family-sharing features or its Secret Key architecture exactly, so the right pick depends on whether you value cost or specific features more.

Security incidents are worth reading about directly. LastPass disclosed a security incident in 2022 involving unauthorized access to backup data, including some encrypted vault contents. LastPass’s own updates on the matter are detailed and worth reading before you decide where to store your passwords, regardless of which manager you ultimately choose.

Whatever you pick, the decision is independent of how you protect your tabs. A password manager and a tab-recovery tool solve different problems, and running both costs you nothing in terms of conflict. What matters is that you set one of each up, rather than assuming your browser’s default behavior will cover both jobs on its own — because for tabs specifically, most browsers don’t keep more than a short list of recently closed items, and none of them offer the kind of rolling, automatic version history that a dedicated extension does.

If you’re setting up a new browser profile from scratch, doing both installs back to back, a password manager and a tab manager, takes maybe ten minutes total and closes the two biggest gaps in a typical setup.