Third-party printer drivers will no longer be supported by Microsoft in the near future. The company announced this this week.

Third-party printer drivers will no longer be supported for the foreseeable future, Microsoft announced earlier this week.

Why

Since the introduction of Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has supported Mopria-compatible printing systems over network and USB interfaces through the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. This eliminates the need for printer manufacturers to develop separate drivers. This means you no longer have to adapt your own systems to all versions and editions of Windows.

With this, Microsoft is ceasing maintenance of the older v3 and v4 printer drivers for Windows. The company is aware that this affects many users and therefore proposes a (tentative) timeline:

• September 2023: first announcements
• 2025: Manufacturers can no longer release new drivers for Windows Update (but can continue to maintain and update existing ones)
• 2026: Microsoft changes the driver ranking in favor of the IPP class driver
• 2027: Updates for third-party drivers are no longer available, except for security reasons (these drivers are still accessible).

Windows still allows third-party drivers to be installed, but through separate installation packages. Installing already produced printers on a Windows PC is also no problem.

In other recent Microsoft news, we saw earlier this week that the company would penalize you if you organize photos into folders on OneDrive and that it wants to make extra money from the Teams communications platform. The most recent change in Windows is the disappearance of Wordpad after several decades of faithful service.