Say goodbye to WordPad in the latest Windows 11 Canary Build

Microsoft had plans to remove WordPad from Windows 11 for months, and it was listed as a deprecated feature since September 2023 according to Microsoft’s Deprecated features page.

Windows Insiders reported that WordPad is gone in the latest build, and it’s only a matter of time before WordPad is removed for regular users as well.

WordPad is gone in the latest Windows 11 Canary Build

Judging by the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26040, WordPad won’t be installed anymore after performing a clean install and it will be removed automatically after installing this build.

Unlike some features that were removed but made available for installation from the Microsoft Store, that won’t be the case for WordPad, since it’s gone for good.

Here’s an official statement from Microsoft regarding deprecated features:

WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.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.

With this build Microsoft finally did that, so no more WordPad on Windows 11. This is no shock because compared to other text editors, WordPad was lacking in features and it didn’t have as large userbase as Word.

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has removed a core default app, and there were plans to remove Paint app from Windows, however after user backlash it was revamped and returned and it’s now enhanced with DALL-E 3 features.

What are your thoughts on this change? Is WordPad gone forever or will it make a comeback? Let us know in the comments below!