UAC: Annoying by Design
On Thursday at the RSA Conference, a manager at Microsoft revealed that UAC was put into Windows Vista to annoy users. While many might agree with this, there is more to it, even though you would probably never guess so by reading comments on Slashdot or Digg. Microsoft made UAC annoying to try to get users angry with the ISVs that were releasing applications that were causing the prompts. Instead, users’ anger became focused at Microsoft.
Paul Thurott, among others, has pointed out that these prompts were popping up because applications were behaving badly to begin with. They had gained their bad behavior from the Windows XP days when they could be expected to be run with administrator privileges, allowing them full access to the entire system. This was and still is considered bad behavior for a good reason: the ability to modify protected areas of the file system and the registry is what allows malware to infect your entire computer. By preventing applications from writing to these areas (with the exception of updating the application) can help contain malware infections to a a single user account instead of giving them full access to core parts of the system.
Sometimes, I wish that users would actually take the time to place the blame on the right entity when something goes wrong with their computer instead of just doing the popular thing and blaming it on Microsoft and Vista. Most of the time, the problem does not lie in Microsoft code, but rather that written by third parties. The case of UAC is a prime example of this: people see a UAC prompt and blame Vista for it instead of spending a little time trying to figure out why it is showing up. If people actually knew why they were getting these prompts, I’m sure they would actually start putting a little pressure on ISVs to fix their software instead of blindly blaming Microsoft.
