Windows 7 Will Be Less Annoying Than Vista
Windows users tired of constantly being nagged by the operating system’s pop-ups will be getting a reprieve, Microsoft says.
Windows Vista’s much-reviled User Account Control, or UAC, feature will be revised and scaled back for Windows 7, Microsoft’s next desktop operating system.
“We are obviously concerned users are responding out of habit due to the large number of prompts rather than focusing on the critical prompts and making confident decisions,” software engineer Ben Fathi writes on Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 blog. Fathi lays out the UAC game plan for Windows 7 in a lengthy post which addresses the multiple reasons behind the change.
One of the original intentions of the UAC feature was to let users know whenever system-level changes were being made to their computer — a firewall is being disabled, a plug-in is being downloaded and so on. The idea was to give less experienced users a heads-up, to let them know about the changes to their system taking place in case any of them were being done maliciously by outside parties.
For everyone else, however, the pop-ups are just plain annoying. Even inexperienced users soon tired of constantly being bombarded by UAC’s prompts. If you’ve used Vista for any length of time, you’ll know that continually being asked to Allow or Cancel seemingly mundane actions, having to click Yes to continue, needing to convince Windows that yes, I really am SURE over and over again is enough to throw one into a blind rage.
The UAC prompts were so bad, they were famously ridiculed by Apple in its “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads.
Fathi says Microsoft is revamping UAC and reducing the number of prompts for two reasons: usability and security. Usability is a no-brainer — your desktop OS should be your friend, not your mommy. Security is an issue with UAC because there are simply too many prompts, and important things like malware alerts can slip through among all the noise.
Windows 7 is thought to be scheduled for release during the summer of 2009, though some sources report that it won’t be ready until January 2010. Microsoft is expected to announce a firm delivery date at an upcoming developer’s conference at the end of October. [Thanks for the tip, haijak]
Feel the pain:
See Also:
