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.'"

Comments

Re:Cancel or allow what?!

[COMON$]

Security vs Ease of use, wow what a new concept, sure glad MS is around to show us these concepts. Seriously the MS design team is waaaaay behind the curve if they are just figuring this out.

I always thought MS was vague because they really didn't have a clue what their other dev teams were doing.

Re:Cancel or allow what?!

[TheLink]

The UAC is crap.

The fact that it annoys people enough to either turn it off permanently, or just mindlessly click "allow" should show you how bad it is.

There ARE alternatives ways to achieve better security.

What Microsoft should have done was provide much better sandboxing.

I'd personally go for sandbox templates:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

After years of development (and how many billions of dollars), it's quite disgraceful that the best Microsoft can provide is the crap called UAC.

Imagine if all those apps had unique messages

[gznork26]

This seriously dates me, but...

Back in the early days of IBM mainframes, there was a migration from a version of their OS which required the program to specify which tape drive to hang a reel on, to one which picked a drive for you, and thereby managed that resource. One vendor sold an add-on that enabled companies to continue using their old software under the new OS by intercepting those mount messages, which meant supplying it with the text of each one it might encounter. Once the messages were all supplied, the console quieted down and the operator no longer had to deal with programs insisting on a tape drive that was either broken or non-existent.

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