Chris Jackson, a developer and application compatibility expert on the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team, released some info that they gathered relating to UAC. They removed enterprise users, and beta testers from the 9 million user sessions they have data on during the period from October to December in 2007. Previously, 84% of consumers had UAC enabled, but that number has now gone up to 88%. Now this probably isn’t all that amazing of a statistic, what’s maybe more surprising is that 12% have disabled it. What is encouraging is that the percentage that disable it has gone down, but this number may not mean what you think as statistics can be deceiving.

Why would fewer people be disabling UAC? Statistically, I don’t believe fewer people are. What’s likely happened is that earlier adopters of Vista are more computer savvy, and thus are more likely to disable the feature, since they’re more likely to know how, and are more likely to resent the ‘restrictions’ UAC imposes. As time passes, more ‘average’ users start using Vista, and are less likely to disable it either because they don’t see it as a big deal, or they don’t know how. Therefore, the same number, or even slightly more, are disabling UAC, but the pool of average users they are a part of is growing much quicker, so statistically they become a smaller part of the whole.

Chris talks a bit more about his work in trying to reduce repetitive prompts from various applications, which is due mostly to poorly coded apps. He also makes a good case on why UAC is important to have running in the first place, and I would say it’s doubly true with the average consumer PC, which commonly has a non-technical user responsible for maintaining it.