Microsoft caves in, will change Windows 7 UAC

06.02.2009
Reacting to intense criticism of an important security feature in Windows 7, Microsoft Corp. Thursday said it will change the behavior of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7's release candidate.

"We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that well all see," said John DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two Microsoft executives responsible for Windows' development, in the second of two posts to the .

"First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation," said DeVaan and Sinofsky. "Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation."

The changes, they said, were prompted by feedback from users, including comments appended to an earlier post Thursday by DeVaan in which he in Windows 7.

"Our dialog is at that point where many do not feel listened to and also many feel various viewpoints are not well-informed," DeVaan and Sinofsky said in the later blog post. "That's not the dialog we set out to have and we're going to do our best to improve."

The UAC feature, which debuted in 2007 as part of Windows Vista, but was altered to reduce the number of prompts in Windows 7, has been under fire since last week, when two Windows bloggers, Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng, first reported that it could .