Comments on: Vista UAC poll: 67% disabled it -Tips for handling UAC

By: Dan Shappir

Dan Shappir — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:41:00 +0000

We no longer have to guess that annoying the users was a UAC design goal. Microsoft has now publicly stated it. Read more on my blog: http://ericomguy.blogspot.com/2008/04/are-you-annoyed-by-vista-uac-its-by.html

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:55:09 +0000

Dan, I think you are right. Maybe the strategy to get on the nerves of users in order to educate developers was not really a good one.

By: Dan Shappir

Dan Shappir — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:05:13 +0000

It’s my understanding that one of the reasons Microsoft made UAC so intrusive is to put pressure on ISVs to make their software more compliant with security restrictions. In other words, not to require administrative privileges for no good reason. If UAC usage is indeed going down then so will the pressure on ISVs. This will, in turn, cause more people to turn it off. This could mark the begining of a death spiral for UAC.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:02:25 +0000

Colin, I agree that there is some room for improvement. I’ve read that they already changed something in Vista SP1. The UAC prompts seem to pop up less frequently. But what I miss the most, is a tool where I can fine tune which apps and which parts of the OS require elevation prompts and which don’t. Hopefully Windows 7 will come with such a feature.

Dan, I just read your article. You linked to my post at the end of November, so you have slightly different numbers. It is worthwhile to note that the numbers changed over time. The longer this poll runs the more opt to disable UAC.

By: Dan Shappir

Dan Shappir — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:23:37 +0000

This is a subject I’ve blogged about, including this poll: http://ericomguy.blogspot.com/search/label/UAC

Overall, like you, I like the concept but have issues with the implementation. The title of my original post about this subject was “Why Vista UAC Is Good, Sort Of”

By: ITsVISTA Web Links: January 3rd, 2008 | ITsVISTA

ITsVISTA Web Links: January 3rd, 2008 | ITsVISTA — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 02:28:51 +0000

[...] 4sysops – Vista UAC poll: 67% disabled it -Tips for handling UAC Michael talks about UAC, and the large number of IT pros that disable it. (tags: UAC ) [...]

By: Colin Bowern

Colin Bowern — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:46:10 +0000

It’s a shame that people are disabling this feature. What I really like about Vista is not necessarily the implementation, but that they’ve chosen to go forward with this controversal move. UAC exposes a lot of the poor development practices that exist out there. Even Microsoft’s own applications suffer from it. The latest Dynamics GP release (from late 2007) requires you to disable UAC for it to execute properly because they have chosen to write to the Program Files folder. The execution of UAC can certainly be optimized and I expect we’ll see more of that in the next major Windows release. If people wanted to have an impact on how it works they should have been loading up the beta copies of Windows and providing feedback. The product groups took the feedback they received and made the best guess at how to implement it to suite a majority of situations. With UAC in the wild now they’ll be able to get a larger degree of feedback and address it with the necessary implementation changes. I would challenge all those that have disabled UAC to file a piece of feedback on Microsoft Connect *before* they disable it outlining what they think could be done to make it work for them.

On the development side there have been a set of guidelines in place for quite some time now on how to develop applications that will behave under a normal user account. It is known as the Designed for Windows guidelines. Unfortunately no one respected it because Windows granted you administrative rights for your first user. With Windows Vista they took the lead of what Apple has already done in Mac OS X which is build a system to prompt you to run the process as an alternative user. I have to appauld them for taking this move because it’s cleaning up a lot of smelly code. It will be painful, but we’ll get more robust applications in the end because of it. So in the end please don’t disable UAC, lobby your software vendors to get their act together. They have had plenty of notice and it’s time that we stood up for quality software that uses supported methods for accessing system resources in a secure, stable fashion.