Running 1Password on Zen Browser

I've recently been trying out the Zen browser and I thought it was really awesome! The only problem I was experiencing was that 1Password was not working with it natively. I run Linux, so it's not as simple as downloading the browser binary that is signed by Apple and, therefore, trusted.

So I searched the internet and found a few articles and references to it, mainly,

Support for Zen browser

Hi! There’s this new browser called "Zen browser" It’s based on Firefox but the 1password extension doesn’t work with the desktop app

1Password Communityl4kr

1Password Integration Fix

This guide is designed to help you integrate 1Password Desktop App with Zen Browser, for a more straight forward workflow when accessing your credentials using this password manager…

All of these articles alluded to the fact that you needed to add zen-bin to your /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers. So I did that and rebooted my PC, but this is what I saw on the extension:

No matter what I did, whether installing from Flathub, from source, or from the AppImage, I was unable to get this working. But then I thought, maybe it has to do with the user permissions, instead of downloading the tar.bz2 file and extracting it to my /opt or .local folder, maybe I should try making this a system-wide binary.

When I extracted it to /usr/local/src/zen and ensured that the files were owned by root, I was able to connect to 1Password successfully,

So, in order to make this process a bit easier, I created a script that would download the release from Github and extract it to /usr/local/src/zen. It also creates a .desktop file which I modified from the Flathub settings (shoutout to the Flathub maintainers). You can see that script here:

And that's all you need (apart from adding zen-bin to /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers). When the binary is owned by root, it seems that 1Password then picks up the binary and allows the native integration with the extension.