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Man people love to rewrite history. I ran Vista. It was ok. But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement, annoyed most users a l
by ebbv 9y ago
Man people love to rewrite history. I ran Vista. It was ok. But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement, annoyed most users a lot. They were introduced suddenly without fully explaining why they were necessary. Additionally requiring device manufacturers to write new drivers meant lots of people’s printers went obsolete without warning. That was a PR nightmare.
Also the fancy Aero UI looked cool but was taxing for the average user’s computer. So a lot of people when they installed Vista didn’t get the experience they had been shown in commercials and screenshots.
On top of that literally everything in the OS had moved around from where people had been expecting it to be as far as settings and configuration stuff. Keep in mind people had a pretty consistent experience from 95 to 98 to XP. Vista flipped the script and users no longer knew how to do things. A mistake Microsoft repeated and was similarly punished for in Windows 8.
The whole world was not delusional to say they didn’t like Vista. When all your users say something sucks then you should listen.
Windows 7 was mostly PR but the big thing is that it had device support on rollout.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago> But the constant asking for permission dialogs, while a security improvement It wasn't a security improvement. For one, it mostly just got in the way and trained users to ignore it, negating the purpose of its existence, but it also never protected the user from anything. Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions.
- user5994461 9y agoIt trained developers to develop their apps properly to not need a prompt.
- rossy 9y ago> Case in point: ransomware needs no elevated permissions. That's the result of how we drew up the security boundaries on desktop operating systems. You don't need admin permissions to rewrite your most important documents, so ransomware running under your user account doesn't either. See also: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ Linux and macOS have this problem too. The solution isn't to remove the security boundary between the user and admin accounts and to go back to the Windows 9x-era of having zero OS-level security. The solution is to create more security boundaries, so that not every program running on your behalf has the permission to rewrite all your documents. UAC was an unpopular, but not totally ineffective step in the right direction.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y agoI disagree, because it's the user's system and they should have permission to change anything they want in the system, that security boundary serves only to annoy the user for no gain whatsoever. What our real goal is, is to prevent misbehaving applications from compromising the user's work. Obvious conclusion: permissions boundaries should be on the applications. On this we agree.