Microsoft says UAC prompts in Windows 7 will be nearly a third fewer than in Vista

Windows Vista’s UAC fiasco left a lasting impression on many as a good reason to just disable UAC or stay away from Vista altogether. The good news is that software developers have had more than three years to make their apps UAC-friendly by not unnecessarily requiring admin privileges, reducing the overall number of UAC prompts.

User Account Control (UAC) was a security feature introduced in Windows Vista intended to reduce the chance of malware or malicious scripts being executed on the computer. The feature when turned on, would require administrator credentials before performing any action that required elevated permissions.

Director of Windows 7 client enterprise security Paul Cooke, told ComputerWorld today that Windows 7 will have a significantly lower amount of UAC prompts.

From our beta and internal testing, we expect a 29% decrease in UAC prompts compared to Windows Vista

Percentage of Sessions with one or more UAC prompts

Looking back at an article published on October 8, 2008 at the Engineering Windows 7 blog, the number of sessions with one or more UAC prompts had declined to 33% with SP1. This would mean that we can expect almost less than 22% of future sessions to have one or more UAC prompts, compared to 50% of sessions on Vista, six months after its release.