“In part one of my comparison of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, I looked at three key aspects of each system: Look and feel, desktop search, and data visualization and organization. For the most part, OS X came out well ahead of Windows Vista, as you’d expect, since it’s a polished finished product. Vista, meanwhile, is all knees and elbows, an awkward teenager on its way to maturity. Microsoft will iron out the details, I’m sure, but the end result will likely not change much. Specifically, OS X will always be elegant, and Windows will almost certainly lag behind in the fit and finish department. The only questions are how much Vista will improve when compared to previous Windows versions, and whether it will be enough to keep customers from moving to OS X,” Paul Thurrott writes for Supersite for Windows.
“In this second part of the comparison, we’ll look a little deeper, and examine security, networking, and power management. Whereas the features in the first part of the comparison where largely related to user interface issues, this time we’re dealing more with the nitty-gritty of safety, connectivity, and productivity,” Thurrott writes.
Here are a few selected tidbits regarding security from Thurrott’s in-depth article:
Microsoft claims that Windows XP and, by extension, Windows Vista, were architected for security, thanks to their NT roots. That claim is, however, bogus. Windows NT was designed in the pre-Internet days, and though the system’s architecture is extensible, modern Windows versions are further hobbled by the inclusion of the buggy and insecure IE Web browser and other design mistakes. In short, Windows is a house of cards that seems increasingly incapable of handling today’s demands. Mac OS X, meanwhile, was truly designed for excellent security, thanks to its wonderful UNIX roots and clean architecture… he Vista beta adds some security features that OS X has had for years, and it does have a few niceties that OS X lacks. But it’s hard to vote against OS X here. The Vista beta, after all, is still Windows. And though it’s unlikely that pre-Beta 2 versions of Windows Vista will be targeted by a wide range of hackers, future releases most certainly will be.
In OS X, the root account (which is the equivalent of the Administrator account on a Windows system) is disabled by default. And even those user accounts with administrator-level privileges are safer thanks to a graphical version of the UNIX “sudo” command, which provides an authentication dialog box any time you try to do something that could harm the system (Figure). You provide an admin-level user name and password (which in most cases will be identical to the account you used to logon to the system in the first place) and the authentication is granted for just that single act. For all other actions, the system reverts to your standard user-level access.
Not surprisingly, Microsoft is copying this system for use in Windows Vista. So Windows users will soon see the same kinds of authentication dialogs (Figure) in Windows as we see now in OS X. There are just a few problems with doing so this late in the Windows life cycle. First, Windows was never designed to accommodate this type of authentication process, so the entire system has to be retrofitted to work with user lowered permission levels and pop-up the dialogs when needed. Second, and perhaps most damagingly, the millions of available Windows applications out there today all assume that the user has total control of the system. So Vista will have to be kludged in an unprecedented way to accommodate backwards compatibility. The way it will do so is messy, and involves virtual folder structures that fool legacy applications into believing that they are accessing an older Windows version.
Comparing that system with the cleanly designed OS X is almost comical. If Microsoft can pull it off–and this is an uncertainty at this writing–Windows will finally pick up security functionality that the Mac has enjoyed for years. My educated guess is that Vista won’t be as secure as OS X, however, because cobbled together systems are rarely as foolproof as those that were designed correctly from the start.
The full article covers:
• Security
• Logon (User Accounts)
• Parental controls
• Data encryption
• Firewall and system services
• Anti-malware, or stuff Windows needs that OS X does not
• Security updates
• Networking
• Power management
Full article, with much more, here.
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MacDailyNews Take: MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote after Thurrott’s initial article, comparing a beta version to a shipping product that won’t even be the shipping product (that’ll be Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) when Windows Vista ships is an interesting exercise. The two products likely won’t ever be competing against each other (unless Microsoft is early and Apple is late), but Thurrott’s comparison gives us a sense for where both Apple and Microsoft are today and where they might be heading with future OSes.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Thurrott: Microsoft’s Windows Vista Beta 1 vs. Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger – August 29, 2005
Thurrott: Apple Macs offer a safer computing experience than Microsoft Windows PCs – July 20, 2005
Thurrott on spyware: ‘we should have paid more attention to those Apple Switcher ads after all’ – July 08, 2005
Apple to unleash Leopard on Microsoft’s Windows Longhorn; Mac OS X 10.5 due late 2006 – early 2007 – June 07, 2005
Windows tech writer Thurrott: ‘In many ways, Mac OS X Tiger is simply better than Windows’ – May 07, 2005
Thurrott: ‘Longhorn is in complete disarray and in danger of collapsing under its own weight’ – April 27, 2005
Thurrott: Longhorn ‘has the makings of a train wreck’ – April 26, 2005
Thurrott: Longhorn demos ‘unimpressive, fall short of graphical excellence found today in Mac OS X’ – April 26, 2005
