[jonhohle]

Didn’t Microsoft pioneer the privilege escalation prompts in Vista in 2007? It was a joke at the time how little things would hijack the entire screen to allow seemingly mundane things. I didn’t ever use Vista personally or professionally, but macOS has become pretty bad with basically the same model.

[dwaite]

IMHO, both are a mode of progressively penalizing developers as a mode of API obsoletion. It doesn't feel like the opportunity to fix a degradation of user experience really motivated app developers in either case.

The difference is Apple is much more likely to progressively make these legacy feature compatibility more difficult for users to configure over time, and to remove them eventually.

[KennyBlanken]

MacOS X prompted users for their passwords in 2001.

Microsoft's implementation was (twenty years later still is) a joke because it prompted users to hit enter or click a button.

[JCattheATM]

Microsoft's Secure Desktop feature is actually incredibly well designed, and provides strong protect against fraudulent prompts or prompt interception attacks.

[pjmlp]

Only if you configure it like that, you can make it ask for a password, and on more recent versions of Windows 11, optionally, a single use token.

Ironically Apple just recently added the same simpified approach.

[NekkoDroid]

> Only if you configure it like that

It is the default (unless they changed it in the last 2 years or so). I know for a fact that my PC and Laptop don't ask for my password and I know for a fact that I reinstalled Windows on my laptop less than 2 years ago and changed nothing regarding the UAC prompt (the closest that is even remotely close is enabling sudo in the settings).

[pjmlp]

May be, I never leave defaults on neither does our IT, so I might have that wrong.

[kilpikaarna]

It was a joke mainly because of badly designed Windows apps being used to running as root in XP and earlier would ask for permissions _all_the_time_.