If you’ve been playing with the Vista betas recently you’ll have noticed how often it asks for your permission to perform admin level functions. By default Vista runs all users as ordinary level users (even if you’re logged in as an Admin) and asks for permission via “Elevation Prompts” every time an admin function is required. All fine and dandy – and much more secure – in theory, but many people have commented on how “chatty” this makes Vista. Early betas were worse and just copying a file can be really quite annoying.
Well, Steve Hiskey of the Windows Security Core Group over at Microsoft has written about how they intend to reduce elevation prompts and how they are working hard, both internally and with external ISVs, to make Vista a little less “noisy”. Well worth a read if you’re concerned about all those pesky elevation prompts, or if you’re writing applications for Vista and want to help improve things.
The UAC team have quite a challenging role – to make using Vista more secure without making it more cumbersome and more difficult to use than XP. They still have a few challenges ahead of them, but I can vouch for their commitment and support for independent software vendors as Steve and his team were extremely supportive in helping us ensure Macro Scheduler could record properly in Vista. So if you’re beta testing Windows Vista be sure to help them out via their blog.
