Impact on the software ecosystem:
UAC has resulted in a radical reduction in the number of applications that unnecessarily require admin privileges, which is something we think improves the overall quality of software and reduces the risks inherent in software on a machine which requires full administrative access to the system.
In the first several months after Vista was available for use, people were experiencing a UAC prompt in 50% of their “sessions” - a session is everything that happens from logon to logoff or within 24 hours. Furthermore, there were 775,312 unique applications (note: this shows the volume of unique software that Windows supports!) producing prompts (note that installers and the application itself are not counted as the same program.) This seems large, and it is since much of the software ecosystem unnecessarily required admin privileges to run. As the ecosystem has updated their software, far fewer applications are requiring admin privileges. Customer Experience Improvement Program data from August 2008 indicates the number of applications and tasks generating a prompt has declined from 775,312 to 168,149.
Figure 2. Number of unique applications and tasks creating UAC prompts.
This reduction means more programs work well for Standard Users without prompting every time they run or accidentally changing an administrative or system setting. In addition, we also expect that as people use their machines longer they are installing new software or configuring Windows settings less frequently, which results in fewer prompts, or conversely when a machine is new that is when there is unusually high activity with respect to administrative needs. Customer Experience Improvement Program data indicates that the number of sessions with one or more UAC prompts has declined from 50% to 33% of sessions with Vista SP1.
Figure 3. Percentage of sessions with prompts over time.
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