Windows 11 Preview Build Removes WordPad

[T0@st]

Microsoft quietly added WordPad to its "Deprecated features for Windows client" list last September—a short message stated that the popular bundled-in word processing application will: "no longer be updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like.doc and.rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like.txt." The aforementioned "future" version of their mainstream operating system appears to be the recently issued Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26040 (through Canary Channel). Microsoft is pushing an AI feature enriched user experience—last week's Insider blog reveals that Voice Clarity is escaping its Surface family confines; the application no longer relies on NPU hardware.

According to Preview 26040's accompanying notes: "Starting with this build, the WordPad and People apps will no longer be installed after doing a clean install of the OS. In a future flight, WordPad will be removed in an upgrade. WordPad will not be reinstallable. WordPad is a deprecated Windows feature." Many journalists have pointed out that protest efforts could save WordPad from its deprecated fate—enough fuss was generated over Microsoft's proposed axing of MS Paint, to warrant a reversal and eventual AI-enrichment. A segment of the Windows userbase will welcome the upcoming dismissal of Cortana (already effective in the latest W11 preview)—their older personal productivity assistant is being pushed aside in favor of Windows Copilot.



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[xorbe]

Because they prefer you use cloud services. They would remove Notepad if they thought they could get away with it.

 

[kapone32]

It would seem that anything that is remotely useful to most users MS likes to remove.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

We recommend

It's so cheeky of them to assume they're worth listening to. We pay you to make software, you dare to remove useful tools from it without any replacement whatsoever. M$ Word is not a replacement, it's a paid DLC.

Up next: "launching .exe files is now a part of the Microsoft Premium Package. You can subscribe for just $69.99 a year!"

 

[erocker]

Instead of new features, Microsoft has pivoted to bringing new annoyances to their operating system. Whoever is making these decisions doesn't belong selling anything to anyone.

 

[Tropick]

The beatings will continue increasing in severity until morale improves.

 

[Frank_100]

Literally the dumbest OS company.

How windows f_ed up and became the dominant desktop is a wonder.

These mouth breathes couldn't pour piss from a boot with instructions on the heal.

It is only a matter of time before IBM, Oracle or Google make a serious effort to turn WINE into something useful.

It already happened with IBM Symphony paving the way for Libre Office to devastate MS Office.

 

[natr0n]

get ready for subscriptions

 

[Double-Click]

On one hand I don't care at all about Word Pad, on the other hand I really don't like the direction they've been heading.
Drop the offline apps and replace them with AI, who will promptly direct users to cloud and subscription services...

 

[Beermotor]

I don't think there's anything nefarious behind it other than they're tired of maintaining it. The codebase is at least 30 years old at this point (it first appeared in the Windows 4.0 "Chicago" betas) so I'm sure it's a pain.

Microsoft open sourced File Manager and a few other older Windows apps so perhaps they'll GPL this one and stick it up on Github.

 

[fec32a4de]

Any way to stick on same Windows 11 23H2 on an ARM PC? The registry target version doesn't seem to work. Rather not upgrade W11 on ARM further as it already does a decent job of x86_64 translation (Win 11 was required for this to work on 64bit apps). Native ARM apps like 7z, VLC already work great.

Just hoping they won't backport "AI" as a separate update

 

[Easo]

Ok, honestly, who used it? It was either Notepad or full Office package (or non-MS office one). It's very outdated, even Notepad has changed a lot now.

 

[Tropick]

Ok, honestly, who used it? It was either Notepad or full Office package (or non-MS office one). It's very outdated, even Notepad has changed a lot now.

I think most people (including myself) are just upset with the continual trend of on-device applications getting offloaded to cloud subscription services like MS Office. Wordpad was nice for occasional users of text editors that needed something a little more powerful than notepad but not as built out as office. It was a nice little freebie that I'm sure didn't cost Microsoft much to maintain and there's no real reason to get rid of it other than pushing Office subscriptions. Is it a huge deal? No. Is it a disappointing sign of the times? Yes. Sort of how a lot of cars back in the day came with a set of rubber floor mats for the winter, and now it's a ~$100 option when you purchase the car. Not a deal breaker, but just disappointing.

 

[Shou Miko]

I never really written anything in Wordpad, sure I opened rtf documents in it from time to time but never fully used it.

I notepad if I don't use OnlyOffice at home and at work it's Office 365 E3.

 

[Event Horizon]

Let's add things nobody wants and remove things people still use.

 

[Shou Miko]

Let's add things nobody wants and remove things people still use.

That's the Silicon Valley OS way I guess

 

[phints]

To people complaining you are actually using this? I didn't even know Wordpad still existed. I only use Notepad, or for bigger items the free/open source Notepad++.

Anything business related it's MS Word.

 

[Random_User]

Is it a huge deal? No.

It franky is. Because it's first of many, the beginning of the end. As many people already have said, they remove the useful and incremental things from the OS, while adding absolute trash.
WordPad may be old, but it sometimes is useful, for some moderate text editing. N++ is much more better, but fo maybe some testbench without internet connection, it's much better than notepad, which can't even properly work with UTF-8, to begin wth.

Heck, the W10 clean start of OS. No autorun stuff, except couple of non-MS services, couple drivers and that's it. 115 processes in the background at the very start. I don't even mention, the Defender and Updater, impede every program launch, unless, install the update and restart PC and manually disable defender.
Who in the right mind, adds sensors, gyro, screen block, and other phone-specific stuff on desktop OS? I know people can install Windows on some kind of mobile devices. But still. So many bloatware. And the worst part, they put this garbage in countless svhost.exe, and perplex it with key services. Such a scam. The OS and Defender behave worse than Win32:Trojan. If there's something to remorsely carve out from OS, this crap is what they should begin with.
Dang, People complained, that Linux distros are hard to work with, due to initial maintenance. But there's no more garbage OSes, than W10/11, in terms of difficulty. I don't even know, what is to harder, to install manually install many drivers and programs, than to chop that rubbish from the core of OS, just in order to begin the normal use of it.

 

[Frick]

It's so cheeky of them to assume they're worth listening to. We pay you to make software, you dare to remove useful tools from it without any replacement whatsoever. M$ Word is not a replacement, it's a paid DLC.

God no, it's absolutely not. Word is great, but it's something very different from Wordpad.

Ok, honestly, who used it? It was either Notepad or full Office package (or non-MS office one). It's very outdated, even Notepad has changed a lot now.

Notepad and Wordpad are very different things. One is a text editor, the other is a very lightweight word processor that comes bundled with almost every Windows system in existance. I use it a lot at work for printing instructions and labels and stuff, because it's so much lighter than Libreoffice. It does what I want it to do, and again, it's just there. I don't have to install several hundred megabytes worth of softwar, which HUGE if you're in a corporate environment.

To people complaining you are actually using this? I didn't even know Wordpad still existed. I only use Notepad, or for bigger items the free/open source Notepad++.

Totally different use cases.

 

[trsttte]

Microsoft open sourced File Manager and a few other older Windows apps so perhaps they'll GPL this one and stick it up on Github.

That would be cool but wouldn't make this move any less unnecessary. It's like powertoys, half (or more) are basic tools I'd expect would be available in a modern system - like fancy zones, windows 11 finally has a couple of defined zones but there's no way to edit them so fancy zones is still the best solution.

Probably one of the open source editors will add some features to bridge the gap between basic text editor and full document editor but this is just annoying.

 

[lexluthermiester]

View attachment 332148

The beatings will continue increasing in severity until morale improves.

Yeah, I'm having none of either... Cortana currently is completely removed and the AI crap will be too.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Not something I personally would remove but I've never bothered to use wordpad.

I still use notepad app from windows 7 along with it's snipping tool and paint so I wouldn't care if they removed 10-11's notepad.....

 

[mechtech]

Hoping for a LTSC w12 version..............

 

[R-T-B]

Because they prefer you use cloud services. They would remove Notepad if they thought they could get away with it.

They just recently updated it to have tabs. They aren't abandoning that.

The beatings will continue increasing in severity until morale improves.

Somehow seeing this with a Professor Membrane avatar is very disturbing... not that anything Invader Zim related isn't, but yeah...

 

[lexluthermiester]

Not something I personally would remove but I've never bothered to use wordpad.

I use it all the time. This irritates me..