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Microsoft: Vista UAC was supposed to piss you off
Some users get around this by disabling or modifying the UAC using programs like TweakUAC. Others insist that Microsoft put it there for a reason, and disabling will result in your computer bursting into a ball of flames. But if you're tired of looking at UAC prompt after UAC prompt, here's something that should give you a little comfort: Microsoft knew all along that the UAC prompt was annoying and designed it to be that way.
Microsoft product manager David Cross says the goal was to make users think twice about making changes to their system willy nilly. It's also designed so that software developers will think of ways to write programs that don't burrow too deeply into your operating system. The less system configuration changes a program makes, the less often you're going to see a UAC prompt.
Cross says that 88% of Vista users have not disabled UAC, and 66% of Windows sessions do not lead to a UAC prompt showing up. And that makes sense if you're someone who just runs the software that came with your computer and a handful of other applications. But if you're constantly looking for cool new programs to add features to your computer -- in other words, a typical Download Squad reader -- we're guessing you see the UAC prompt a lot more often than most users.
Comments
25
Subscribe to commentsJamesApr 14th 2008 2:06PM
It's funny you should mention the difference between IE and Firefox, because Vista's UAC is the Firefox to XP's IE. Here's what I mean: in IE, the "forgiving" HTML rendering encouraged people to write terrible web pages, sometimes tailoring them to IE's foibles. FF came along and enforced standards better than what IE had been doing, highlighting the bad code people were already writing.
Likewise, in XP programmers who write package installers can abuse admin privileges to indulge in all kinds of bad system-security practices, because pretty much everybody runs in an admin account. In Vista, they're trying to push software authors do to things the "right" way, using the provided mechanisms to create installers that don't violate security best practices, just like how FF stuck to their guns and called web authors out on their errors.
I'm not saying UAC is the best way to handle the problem, but I do have to applaud them for (finally) actually doing something about it.
QuikboyApr 12th 2008 7:25PM
I know a lot of people don't like UAC, but how hard is it to say no? I heard that these prompts don't come too often once you're more settled in, so is it hard to say no if you feel that it's safe? I find it better to be notified about something that could really change my system, than to turn it off and leave me guessing if anything got installed on my computer without asking me.
I mean OS X and Linux does that as well, right?
Just my point of view.
wilycoyoteApr 12th 2008 7:26PM
UAC: Just say NO
SeanrossApr 14th 2008 8:58AM
Blegh, I turned that crap off within the first day of getting the computer.
KevinmApr 14th 2008 8:05PM
Certainly Linux does pop up a similar dialog, in Ubuntu (and any distro where the user does not log into their Window Manager as root) the user is required to enter their password! And it also interrupts the session just like UAC. The difference is that the uses that make this pop-up are rare and understandable. You really only see them when using Synaptic (which is able to install packages in root) or when adjusting global system settings.
When I use Vista, I am constantly wondering why the dialog pops up for so many little things. Now I understand, but it still doesn't make Vista "safe".