The Leopard Report: The Danger of Too Many Prompts
January 10th, 2008Every time you install an application with a traditional installer under Mac OS X, you have to enter your user password first, unless, of course, the installer has no provision for that. And most do.
When you first run an application that you download from the Internet, Leopard delivers another warning, explaining it is a downloaded file, by which browser and when. You can click Open right now, or Cancel, and try again later. Once you accept the launch request, the prompts go away forever.
Now both warning messages are supposed to be good things. The first allows only someone with administrator privileges to install applications. The theory being that unwanted or unauthorized software will not be allowed to pollute your Mac’s hard drive. The second affects the actual application, which usually comes in a disk image file, and again you can rethink your decision whether its something you want to use or not.
