After nearly three decades, it’s time to say goodbye to WordPad as Microsoft is pulling the plug on the basic text editing app. It’s time to focus on Notepad and Microsoft Word.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt,” reads a support note published by Microsoft.
The app has always been auto-installed on Windows systems since 1995 and since 2020 it has become an optional feature, meaning users could delete it if they so chose. Nobody is sure whether it will have any impact on Windows users since there are plenty of alternatives to WordPad. Further, most are using NotePad and Word.
WordPad shipped with Windows 95 along with the first version of Internet Explorer. It replaced the basic word processor called Microsoft Write. The news of WordPad being taken to the guillotine comes days after Microsoft revealed it’s upgrading Notepad with features like autosave and automatic restoral of tabs.
In the season of sunsets, Microsoft has also announced that it is killing off Visual Studio for Mac while Google has announced the end of the Pixel Pass subscription. This year, Microsoft also killed off the app for its voice-based assistant Cortana.
