Today I’m excited to release a significant update for Kee, almost a year in the making!
When you upgrade you’ll find a much-improved visual appearance in the main extension “popup” - the bit that appears when you click on the Kee icon in your browser toolbar.
Behind the more modern visual appearance there are some great improvements to existing features such as creating and updating passwords, as well as an improved search that can filter matched entries as well as all other entries in your connected password source.
If your computer offers an option to prefer a dark background, you’ll see that Kee will now automatically match your preference for the light or dark side.
Aside from all the updates to the popup, we’ve also included a variety of enhancements to the way that Kee identifies the primary username field and submit buttons. For those rare occasions where authentication to a website is via Basic HTTP Auth, we now sort the matches, bringing Realm matches to the top - this should help users with many entries for these types of website.
There’s still a lot of work to update the other parts of Kee to look similar to the style of the new popup - in some cases this will involve removing old features and replacing them with alternative ways to do the same as before. Just like with this update, we’ll make sure that the changes are intuitive and announced well in advance but there’s no avoiding the need for a little bit of muscle-memory retraining.
As usual, we can’t predict when your browser developer will make this upgrade automatically available to you but if you get fed up of waiting you can always install the latest beta version to see the new features immediately.
I hope you enjoy using the improvements every day as much as I do - please read on for more information about a couple of areas relating to this upgrade and please do let us know what you think.
New Tutorial experience
Try out the new password saving experience on the updated tutorial website: https://tutorial-addon.kee.pm/
Note that if you already have saved some entries for the kee.pm website (such as this forum or the old tutorial) this will slightly alter the experience from that described for new users. In particular you may find that the newly created entry does not auto-fill on steps 3 and 4.
I hope that this updated tutorial experience will help new users quickly get to grips with the improved Kee user interface, as well as provide a gentle (re?)introduction to how some of the essential Kee features can work for existing users.
During user testing of the old tutorial website, I was surprised to find that the freedom that the first page offers for selecting a username and password is actually a significant mental hurdle for many people so I’m trying an alternative approach of dictating the values that should be typed. There are also a lot of additional improvements throughout the 4 steps of the tutorial that take advantage of the improvements released in Kee 3.5.
Until you are running Kee 3.5 or higher, you’ll see the old tutorial website.
New KeePassRPC required
This section does not apply to users of only Kee Vault.
Without an upgrade to the latest version of KeePassRPC - 1.12.1 - you will be unable to use Kee 3.5.
Although Kee 3.5 was developed to be backwards compatible with older versions of KeePassRPC, we have decided to enforce a requirement for the recently released v1.12.1 because of the critical security vulnerabilities that were fixed in that version. If you have not already seen and acted upon the information in A critical security update for KeePassRPC is available please do so immediately, even if you later choose to postpone the upgrade to Kee 3.5 for any reason.
We know how disruptive it is for an automatic extension update to suddenly stop working but we feel that this intrusive behaviour is better than risking any Kee user running the old insecure version of KeePassRPC. If you have already upgraded your version of KeePassRPC, the update to Kee 3.5 will be as smooth as usual.
In less critical news, note that the main KeePass username and password will always be saved with the names “KeePass username” and “KeePass password” respectively, despite Kee sometimes initially presenting them with less generic field names. This is due to limitations in the way that we store additional Kee information into each KeePass entry and can’t be easily changed. We have a GitHub issue to track the necessary work at https://github.com/kee-org/keepassrpc/issues/101
