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Microsoft Kills WordPad After 23 Years
Along with the end of the long-running text editor, Microsoft will also be cutting support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1, starting this month.
Since its inclusion in Windows 95, Microsoft is deprecating WordPad, the company's text-editing application, in all versions of its OS.
Microsoft unceremoniously announced the end of the long-running Windows feature on Friday in a short update on its deprecated Windows feature page.
"WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," said Microsoft. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt."
The company did not share why it was killing its text editor. While lacking many of the features of its paid Word application (including spell check), Windows WordPad offered users a cost-free alternative to document creation and editing. However, the company had not updated WordPad since it released the Ribbon UI in Microsoft Office 2007.
It is important to note that one of Microsoft's suggested alternatives, NotePad, will continue to be free, despite it lacking many of the overlapping formatting features found in both WordPad and Microsoft Word.
Also, as a reminder on the deprecated Windows feature page, Microsoft will be stopping support for some early versions of Transport Layer Security (TLS), for some versions of Windows this month.
"Over the past several years, internet standards and regulatory bodies have deprecated or disallowed TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 due to various security issues," wrote Microsoft. "Starting in Windows 11 Insider Preview builds for September 2023 and continuing in future Windows OS releases, TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will be disabled by default. This change increases the security posture of Windows customers and encourages modern protocol adoption."