Microsoft announces that it will abolish WordPad updates and remove them from Windows

Microsoft has announced that updates for the word processing software ``WordPad'' included in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 and later versions will be discontinued on September 1, 2023, and will be removed from Windows in the future.

Deprecated features in the Windows client - What's new in Windows | Microsoft Learn

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features

Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is-killing-wordpad-in-windows-after-28-years/

Unlike Notepad, which is a simple text editor, WordPad allows for easy formatting such as changing the font, bolding, italicizing, coloring, centering, etc. It was originally developed as a successor to the word processing software 'Microsoft Write' that was included in Windows 3.x/NT 3.x and earlier, and is installed by default in Windows 95/NT 4.0 and later. However, WordPad has been an optional feature of Windows since Windows 10 Insider Build 19551 released in February 2020, and it was possible to uninstall it freely.

Microsoft says, 'WordPad will no longer be updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. Use Microsoft Word for rich text documents such as .doc and .rtf, and Notepad for plain text documents such as .txt.' We recommend using ``.

Microsoft has not said why it decided to stop updating WordPad and remove it from Windows in the future. Bleeping Computer, a news site familiar with security issues, points out that the malware QBot was able to avoid detection from security software by exploiting a vulnerability in Windows 10's WordPad DLL .

As an example of software that was installed by default on Windows being discontinued, in the past ``Microsoft Paint'' was a feature that was removed and deprecated in the 2017 Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. However, after many people expressed sadness about Microsoft Paint being removed, we are making it available from the Microsoft Store.

Paint is included in the list of deleted and deprecated features in ``Windows 10 Fall Creators Update'', and farewell illustrations continue - GIGAZINE

Bleeping Computer states that WordPad, like Microsoft Paint, may be distributed free of charge at the Microsoft Store even after it is no longer preinstalled on Windows.