Microsoft has said goodbye to WordPad in the new version of Windows 11 that is being tested on the Insider channel. This is the first time that a Windows client operating system does not include this text editor since it was released in Windows 95 28 years ago.

It was announced. Microsoft has added WordPad to its list of “deprecated features for Windows clients” and released a brief message stating that “WordPad will no longer be updated and the software will be removed in future versions of Windows”. The time has come and farewell to WordPad has already happened in the trial versions of Windows 11. It has been deleted and cannot be reinstalled.

We assume that it will not be included in the next stable versions of Windows, and we doubt that it will remain in the Microsoft Store, as happened with Paint, when the company wanted to remove it and community protests forced Microsoft to back down and at least keep its development independent of Windows.

Goodbye WordPad, but use Microsoft Word

A significant number of users have been requesting the system for years Windows, which contains only the components necessary for its operation. A lightweight, high-performance base on which the user is free to install any additional software they like or need, whether from Microsoft or other providers. They paid little attention to us… Windows 11 today is a monster full of services and applications, and when everything around Copilot and AI is finished, it will be much worse.

So I won’t be the one to complain about Microsoft removing apps from Windows. And we’re not just talking about terrible Bloatware. It should eliminate many others that are not essential to its functioning. And not WordPad at all. This “Rich text editor” It was released in Windows 95 to replace the old ‘Write’ and cover its functionality halfway between Notepad and most full-featured word processors. Today it is expendable.

What is more controversial (and we see this in many user comments) is that the choice of software to remove or include in Windows always has the same goal, which is nothing but to serve Microsoft’s business needs and not on user preferences. When it came to saying goodbye to WordPad, Microsoft didn’t mince words. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.”.

We “translate” it in case anyone is lost with the general strategy: We’re eliminating on-premises productivity apps so you can move to the cloud and subscription services like Microsoft 365. Go through the checkout, of course. Fortunately, there are free alternatives of tremendous quality, such as what comes from the LibreOffice suite, and if you’re looking for a direct replacement for WordPad, we recommend Markdown. Who pays because he wants to.

As for the rest, the tested version of Windows 11 also removed the “People” app and the “Cortana” assistant. And we applaud that. The key goal should be to clean up the code. But I mean the user.