Microsoft has begun getting rid of another legacy program in its proprietary operating system. The company has released a new test version of Windows 11 Canary, which is missing the WordPad text editor.

Microsoft called WordPad a “deprecated feature” and stated that the feature is no longer in development and therefore will not be included in future versions of Windows 11. The Windows 11 Canary build is only available for download to Windows Insiders testing program members. but it reflects future changes that will soon become the property of all users.

The developer note says:

Starting with this build, WordPad and People will no longer install on a clean operating system installation. In a future release, WordPad will be removed during the update. WordPad will not be able to be reinstalled. WordPad is a deprecated Windows feature.

As you may remember, Microsoft announced WordPad 28 years ago as the successor to the text editor Microsoft Write. The WordPad program was introduced as part of Windows 95, Microsoft’s newest operating system at the time. Since then, WordPad has been included in every version of Windows, providing users with basic text editing capabilities; Supported RTF, DOC, ODT and other popular formats.

Microsoft now recommends using a different text editor. Microsoft said:

We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf, and Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.