On Vista’s Security (vs. XP’s)
So Vista has had fewer security flaws in its first year than XP had in its first year. Because of UAC and IE Protected mode.
…Which is of course an almost meaningless statistic. I’d like to see a comparison of Vista with UAC and XP with LUA, both with IE7. On my computers, I run as a Limited User, in XP. And honestly, I prefer this to running with UAC, since it’s more useful to me to be able to switch to my Admin user, install things, log out, then switch back (with “fast user switching”) to my limited account. Honestly the install procedures with UAC sometimes don’t seem to operate entirely in the Administrator context, and I’ve had permissions end up wonky, and DX10 programs refuse to run.
I’d like to see another option: You get an RDP window to a limited-functionality (yet fully logged in) administrator session, with a wizard like W2k3’s “management wizard”. You pass it the file you want executed, and the wizard sets ownership, installs it, then says “thanks” and logs itself out.
Now, this may be functionally equivalent to what’s going on now, but in my experience, it’s not: There seems to be a distinction between ‘run as administrator’ and even XP’s ‘run as -> [administrative user]‘. (Which may be caused by using a Samba NT4-style domain login…)