Windows 7 UAC could be less of a nag
Microsoft says it’s heard “loud and clear” that Vista users don’t like the way the User Account Control system works. And it’s vowed to improve UAC in Windows 7 – but has defended the principle of the system.
The comments come in a lengthy article on the official Engineering Windows 7 blog. Writer Ben Fathi says the goal in the new system is to refine UAC so that there are fewer but clearer prompts, and users can have more control about what type of prompt they see.
The post says UAC has achieved one of its goals, namely reducing the number of applications which produce prompts from 775,312 to 168,149. That’s because many software producers have redesigned their products to no longer require administrator privileges, a move Microsoft believes improves security. Indeed, Fathi writes that the desire to avoid triggering prompts has actually inspired engineers to write better code to Windows 7.
An added benefit of this trend is that, according to the company’s figures, users now have a one-in-three chance of seeing a prompt each time they use their PC, down from 50% at Vista’s launch.
However, the company acknowledges that the sheer number of prompts is still a problem, not just because of the irritation, but because it reduces the impact of genuinely important prompts such as when malware tries to change system settings.
There’s also a big problem with users getting into the habit of simply clicking approval every time without reading the prompt. Fathi concedes “the dialogs in Vista aren’t easy to decipher and are often not memorable.” He points to company testing which found only 13% of people could understand what a particular UAC prompt means. However, a revised system for Windows 7 performed far better, with 83% being able to decipher the new messages, which are based on asking “a meaningful question”.
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