I don’t know if this really makes any difference. I’m old and cynical and I fear the worst. But the acquiring companies reportedly have a record of, yes, milking existing customers to get a quick revenue boost, then spinning off profitable divisions. So far, nothing has changed, and perhaps the new owners will be good stewards and only make LastPass better. Now LogMeIn is being acquired by private equity companies, in a deal expected to close this summer.

LastPass got a major update in March 2019 after nearly a year, I still don’t like the UI changes, and I think that’s when performance took a nosedive. LogMeIn bought LastPass in 2015, then left it mostly alone, other than some unwelcome price increases. There is some uncertainty about the future of LastPass. The LastPass extension uses CPU cycles when you click or do a search or use it to fill a form, but the CPU and memory usage don’t seem excessive. I’ve studied Chrome’s Task Manager (click Shift-Esc in Chrome – it’s separate from the Windows Task Manager and darned interesting if you like that sort of thing). There are scattered complaints about slowdowns caused by the LastPass extension in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. There’s no excuse for LastPass to respond that slowly. I have a monster computer on my desk – fast processor, 32Gb of RAM, SSDs. The first click on the extension icon is especially problematic: when I open Chrome the first time and browse to a website that needs a password and click on LastPass, I might be waiting 10-15 seconds before the dropdown menu appears. There’s a delay of one to several seconds for just about everything I ask it to do. It’s slow to respond the first time you click on it. The Chrome extension for LastPass is slow. But about its performance, and about the future of the company. Not about its security – the design makes it effectively impenetrable. For the first time, I’m worried about it.

I’ve been using LastPass, and recommending it to everyone, for more than ten years. Okay, now keep that in mind while I complain. Wouldn’t you rather use LastPass, even if it’s a little slow, rather than have that happen to you? Of course you would. I don’t want anyone to read this and get excited and then have something go wrong and lose your passwords and suffer embarrassing hacks and have your identity stolen and wind up homeless and alone. For most people, the “best” program is the one that you already use. If you’re using LastPass, I want you to keep using it! You need a secure way to keep track of passwords and confidential information.

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