[German]On September 1, 2023, Microsoft once again announced which functions they want to part with in future Windows versions. In the new list, some functions are marked as 'deprecated'. So the security protocols for connections, TLS 1.0 and 1.1, are to die now finally. But also WordPad, which has been delivered with Windows for 28 years and is hardly used, is going to the old age and will disappear in the future.
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Microsoft lists on this web page features, which are classified as deprecated, thus no longer further developed. Since August 1, 2023 it was already known that the TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 will be retired. I had already reported about it in the blog post Windows: Microsoft intends to disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 soon by default in Schannel protocol.
Farewell to WordPad
The latest list of obsolete functions that will no longer be developed includes the WordPad program. Microsoft succinctly states that WordPad will no longer be updated and will be removed in a future version of Windows. At this point, the majority of readers will surely ask themselves the question: When did I use WordPad for the last time?
Plain text files are usually opened with an editor. WordPad had one advantage: You could open RTF files from Microsoft Word if their content was not too complex. As a reminder, WordPad as we know it today first shipped with Windows 95 – before that, its counterpart was called Windows Write. And I explained in my beginner's books for kids and seniors 20-25 years ago how to use WordPad to capture text and then add simple formats like boldface. The reduced functionality was simply captivating for beginners.
But then, in practice, the whole world turned to Microsoft Word to create and format the text documents in question. The need to use WordPad had simply not existed on Windows for many years. Microsoft now recommends Microsoft Word as a replacement for opening documents with rich content in .doc and .rtf file formats. And the Windows editor Notepad can be used for opening plain text documents like .txt, after all, they say. I hardly think anyone is shedding a tear for WordPad, are you? (via)
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