Jan 26 2007
Vista’s UAC – Good or Bad?
There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the merits of Vista’s UAC; Jim Allchin wrote a long blog post detailing how they tried to balance the security with usability. My personal opinion is that UAC is too strict and becomes too annoying with too many prompts for seemingly innocent tasks. Installing iTunes, for example, causes 3 or 4 UAC prompts to appear during the installation. Also, editing/deleting files which your user account does not have explicit rights to, causes UAC prompts to appear too.
In my opinion, Microsoft have not got the balance right just yet – the security outweighs the usability.
I know a lot of people that are turning off UAC as soon as they can, and are also recommending to others to turn it off too. This of course is the worse scenario as I do believe that UAC is a good thing, but if it’s too hard to work with people will just switch it off and lose out on the protection that it offers.
To prove my point that this is going to be a big problem as Vista gets released to the general public, Lifehacker have just posted a very helpful article on how to completely disable UAC and the related security warnings that pop up after it has been turned off. This obviously leaves your system in a much less-secure state. Not much progress!