Windows 7 will still contain UAC (User Access Control) but an easier to use, more friendly than the UAC currently in Vista. Over on her “All About Microsoft” blog, Mary Jo Foley has a statement from Ben Fathi, President for Core OS Development in which he states:

“We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated. You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience. We believe this can be achieved by focusing on two key principles. 1) Broaden the control you have over the UAC notifications. We will continue to give you control over the changes made to your system, but in Windows 7, we will also provide options such that when you use the system as an administrator you can determine the range of notifications that you receive. 2) Provide additional and more relevant information in the user interface. We will improve the dialog UI so that you can better understand and make more informed choices.”

This can only be a good thing I do think that the UAC, in principle, is very good idea.

There are a lot of users who aren’t always able to tell that something is potentially dangerous and when the UAC pops up, they tend to cancel the action “just in case”-preventing accidental deletions, virus infections etc.

However, I do agree that the prompts are too frequent and not always clear. As an experienced Windows user, I do get annoyed with the prompts for things such as changing various settings, installing things etc as I know what I’m doing and the UAC just slows me down.

So the ability to alter the scope of the prompts will be good…as long as the settings can be different for each account on the machine…I don’t want the missus to have the same permissions as me..it’d all be on fire within 10 minutes

For an in depth look, head over to the Windows 7 Engineering blog here.