We are talking about the WordPad text editor. Windows 11 will no longer be automatically installed on your computer in future versions. The company clarified that the program will not be available for self-installation either. So this is actually a farewell.

Goodbye WordPad

WordPad was Microsoft’s default program for opening text files. It appeared in Windows 95 and is the successor to the OG Microsoft Write. Originally, WordPad was positioned in two directions:

• It’s like a text editor with some features of Word. But even in their instructions for .doc, .rtf and other formats, the developers suggested using Word itself.
• As a more advanced version of the Notepad (“Notebook”) text editor, released nearly 40 years ago in 1983.

So you could say WordPad is just a weird interconnect between MS Word and Notepad. This is probably why further support has been denied, although the company hasn’t said anything about it.

Microsoft hasn’t updated WordPad in a long time. For example, “Notepad” recently received a number of new features, including tabs and dark mode, as well as autosave, which will be added later. This shows that the company finds this relevant and will continue to provide it as part of the operating system. Instead, WordPad did not have a dark mode, so even then it was possible to suspect that the editor would soon disappear.

It’s hard to tell if anyone has used WordPad recently, since the company doesn’t provide such statistics. But judging by the posts on the network, almost no one has started the program for years – it was mentioned only in very special cases, when Word was unavailable for some reason.