Background
There have been a few questions recently about how 1Password chooses (or knows, depending on your perspective and experience) which logins to offer to fill on a given page. In this post, I want to talk about Precise URL Matching - what it is, how it works, and how it might apply to you.
How Precise URL Matching Works
As of 2.9.8, we have a new feature called Precise URL Matching, which means that your logins are compared against the URL to find the best available match and use it. If more than one login matches at the same level, you get the option to choose. All other logins for the domain are available in the Other Logins menu.
Case Study
Let's create a fictitious scenario. Let's say you have these logins saved:
- 1 login saved for this.domain.com/path/to/secret/page
- 1 login saved for this.domain.com/path/to/some/other/secret/page
- 3 logins saved for that.domain.com/path/to/secret/page?with=queryString
- 1 login saved for another.domain.com
If you go to the main this.domain.com page, the first two logins will match equally because they match the subdomain and top level domain but don't match on the path. So, if you had a login form on the main this.domain.com page and pressed cmd+\ you'd be presented with a popup menu containing the first two logins. The last four logins would be in the Other Logins menu because they don't match as well.
But, if you went to this.domain.com/path/to/secret/page and pressed cmd+\, you'd be logged in with the first login because it is a better match than the second login.
The last scenario involves you visiting a page on that domain that you don't have stored. So, if you go to yetanother.domain.com and press cmd+\, you'll see a popup menu of all six logins. All six match the same because they all match just the top level domain.
Conclusion
If you have many logins for a particular domain, it might be worth the time revisiting the Location field of those logins to see if there are some ways that you could make them more specific. For instance, if you imported your company intranet's login (https://bigcorp.com/intra) and the login for your ERP system (my.bigcorp.com for PeopleSoft, etc.) from the login keychain, it likely has its location as just bigcorp.com. If you changed the Location to the full, precise URL for where those pages actually are, you can login with just a stroke of cmd+\ rather than having to choose from a menu each time.
This might be more information than you bargained for, but I hope that it gives you some insight into what 1Password is doing when it offers you only a subset of your logins for a given domain rather than its old behavior of offering them all every time. Once you understand Precise URL Matching, you can put it to work for you in some interesting ways.
