October 8th, 2008
No surprise: Microsoft to fine-tune UAC in Windows 7
In the latest post on Microsoft’s “Engineering Windows 7″ blog, Microsoft officials acknowledge what everyone’s been assuming: Microsoft is going to fine-tune the User Account Control (UAC) feature with Windows 7.
UAC, which debuted with Windows Vista, provides users with standard user rights, as opposed to uber administrative rights, by default. Microsoft argued that this change would help save users from themselves, so that they wouldn’t accidentally modify system settings, disable antivirus software, etc. When UAC is turned on, users receive many, poorly explained notifications when the system believes they are engaging in “risky” behavior.
With Windows 7, Microsoft is not going to do away with UAC, according to the October 8 post by Ben Fathi, president for core OS development (and others on his team) on the E7 blog. But it is going to “address the customer feedback and satisfaction issues witht the (UAC) prompts themselves,” Fathi blogged. He said with Windows 7 Microsoft has two overriding goals when it comes to UAC. From his post:
“We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated. 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. We believe this can be achieved by focusing on two key principles. 1) Broaden the control you have over the UAC notifications. We will continue to give you control over the changes made to your system, but in Windows 7, we will also provide options such that when you use the system as an administrator you can determine the range of notifications that you receive. 2) Provide additional and more relevant information in the user interface. We will improve the dialog UI so that you can better understand and make more informed choices.”
With Windows 7, Microsoft is endeavoring to reduce unneeded and duplicate prompts; to make prompts more informative; and to provide “better and more obvious control over the (UAC) mechanism,” Fathi’s blog post said.
Fathi said he’s confident the revamped UAC system will be less hated than the original UAC lockdowns introduced with Windows Vista in the name of better security. More from his post:
“We’ve already run new design concepts based on this principle through our in-house usability testing and we’ve seen very positive results. 83% of participants could provide specific details about why they were seeing the dialog. Participants preferred the new concepts because they are ’simple,’ ‘highlight verified publishers,”provide the file origin,’ and ‘ask a meaningful question.’”
UAC seems to be one of the most hated features of Vista. (Just do a Web search for “how can I disable UAC” for unofficial proof of that contention.) From what Microsoft has shared so far, do you think the proposed UAC changes for Windows 7 go far enough to undo the damage to Vista’s reputation done by UAC to date?
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