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Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC
Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,' says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi. 'You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.' According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts — so some may be annoyed that it won't be scrapped entirely, but at least Microsoft is listening. The comments echo those of Steve Ballmer, who admitted at a conference in London that 'the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I'm not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.'"
Seriously, why doesn't Microsoft spend its considerable resources helping fix UAC for Vista? Do it as part of SP2... Since answering UAC is modal (systemwide), it's not like any user-level apps "depend" on it behaving in a specific way/at specific times, so changing its behavior should have no negative effect on those apps...
Or are they admitting defeat and preparing for the next battle (a.k.a. Windows 7)???
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
The details only tell you what application is requesting access.
It most certainly does not tell you:
What file - well, that's not completely true, it gives you the file name but not the path!
What the file operation is (read? append? replace? delete?)
Anything that might help you make your decision
And when I said it tells you what application it is, I mean it tells you the process name, which is generally something very helpful like "RUNDLL32.EXE".
Or maybe they are sometimes vague because the program wanting control of the system is vague itself. I remember being glad the UAC actually worked when browsing a webpage recently. It looked like a completely innocent webpage but all of the sudden the UAC panel comes up with a request for who knows what attached to the website. I still am not sure what it was and why it wasn't picked up by the more robust security systems running on my computer.
If Microsoft only allowed products to show any kind of Windows logo if they complied with the security rules, this wouldn't be a problem. Microsoft loosened up on the logo program because developers weren't willing to bother.
This happened to Apple when they went to the PowerPC, and were dumped by many major software vendors. Apple wasn't in a position to order developers around, and they hadn't realized that. It took years to recover from that.
I've recently upgraded at work from XP to Vista 64 and I really like it. I hate it when I go back to XP now - where's my search?!!! Start button, app title, , it's just ruddy marvellous.
As a developer too UAC makes it much more realistic to develop and test under LUA scenarios.
I don't really get many UAC prompts. What's all this talk about rearranging menu shortcuts? Why the heck would you do that when you can just type the app name and press ENTER using LiveSearch.
I guess I'll be modded down for admitting to liking Vista but am I really alone?
UAC is just a slightly different implementation of Linux's graphical sudo prompt. If Linux were used by the hordes of ordinary intarweb surfers and other everyday lusers, sudo would annoy them enough to want to turn it off permanently (or just log in as root).
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
>I think it would be better if Microsoft implemented something closer to sudo or su, but I think people would complain about that too.
Its called runas and its been around since the first days of NT. When running as limited user you just right-click on an executable and select runas or you can use the command line.