Microsoft’s “Unwieldy And Clumsy” UAC fixed in Windows 7?

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 10 October 2008 11:48

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft’s “Engineering Windows 7” blog has announced that the UAC prompts in Vista are being worked on in Windows 7 to reduce them, make them more informative and to provide more obvious control over the UAC mechanism. Cancel or allow?

The “Engineering Windows 7” blog’s latest entry is simply called  “User Account Control”, and the entry readily admits that UAC is arguably “one of the most controversial features in Windows Vista.”

It asks the questions: “Why did Microsoft add all those popups to Windows? Does it actually improve security? Doesn’t everyone just click “continue”? Has anyone in Redmond heard the feedback on users and reviewers? Has anyone seen a TV commercial about this feature?”

Given that Microsoft is working on its success to Vista, Windows 7, it is taking “a hard look at UAC - examining customer feedback, volumes of data, the software ecosystem, and Windows itself.”

The blog looks at why UAC was implemented, which programs it affected, how many programs popped up UAC prompts and how the current UAC prompt regime was greatly improved by Vista SP1 – and how Microsoft aims to improve it further in Windows 7.

An example from the blog on how UAC prompts have been reduced comes from these paragraphs:

“In the first several months after Vista was available for use, people were experiencing a UAC prompt in 50% of their “sessions” - a session is everything that happens from logon to logoff or within 24 hours.

“Furthermore, there were 775,312 unique applications (note: this shows the volume of unique software that Windows supports!) producing prompts (note that installers and the application itself are not counted as the same program.) This seems large, and it is since much of the software ecosystem unnecessarily required admin privileges to run.

“As the ecosystem has updated their software, far fewer applications are requiring admin privileges. Customer Experience Improvement Program data from August 2008 indicates the number of applications and tasks generating a prompt has declined from 775,312 to 168,149.”

So, what is Microsoft promising to do to change UAC from “unwieldy and clumsy” to “understanding and cool”, which are my playful turns on UAC and not Microsoft’s? And what kinds of questions did customers ask Microsoft on making UAC better?

Please read on to page 2.