Not scaring away users with security

Nick Bradbury has a great blog post about how operating systems scare users from downloading and installing desktop applications with security alerts. There's a big difference between *being* secure and scaring users. It appears to me that the less secure an operating system is, the more it tends to resort to warnings as a way of limiting its liabilities (case in point: Windows and Internet Explorer).

Nick's post frames the issue as one of the reasons why people are moving to using web applications in favor of desktop applications but I want to bring this to the attention of the RIA crowd and Adobe. I know that Adobe (and Macromedia, previously) take security very seriously and I hope that they will continue to do so. However, while doing this, I hope that they remain very sensitive to not scaring users unnecessarily.

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