Microsoft is Suddenly Deprecating a Lot of Windows Features

Historically, Microsoft deprecated features in each Windows version once per year, but it is now moving much more aggressively. In 2022, for example, it deprecated only two features, Windows Information Protection and Update Compliance, separately. But this year, it has deprecated 16 Windows features across several months, two this month alone.

This is interesting on many levels, but I suspect that the change has less to do with Microsoft wanting to cull legacy technologies from Windows—something Apple does a much better job of with the Mac and its other platforms—and more to do with the growing regulation of Big Tech. But whatever the reason, this change mirrors the aggressive manner in which Microsoft added new features to Windows 11 this past year as well. Where Microsoft giveth, Microsoft also taketh away.

For those unfamiliar, deprecated features are those features that Microsoft is no longer developing, either because they’ve been replaced by newer functionality or because they are no longer needed. What happens from there varies by feature, but Microsoft will typically stop installing deprecated features by default while keeping them available optionally for some time. But they will eventually be removed from Windows for good.

We have of course written about some of the recently deprecated features: Microsoft deprecated the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) in October, Computer Browser, the Webclient (WebDAV) Service, and Remote Mailslots in November, followed by the Windows Tips app a few days later and Steps Recorder and Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Office after that. And in December, it’s deprecated two more features, Windows Speech Recognition (WSR, which has been replaced by the more modern Voice access) and now Legacy Console mode.

But these are just the tip of the 2023 iceberg: Microsoft also deprecated the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) in January, Cortana and several other features in June, TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and AllJoyn in August, WordPad in September, and VBScript and Timeline (for Entra ID accounts) in October too. Most—oddly, not all—of these changes can be found on the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn. But it’s a super low-profile way to reveal this kind of information, especially when it happens so often now.

Anyway, this is all healthy and good: Aside from the support issues Microsoft faces, Windows is bogged down by too many legacy features, any one of which could attack vectors for hackers. And so cleaning up Windows in this way benefits us all by making it simpler, more modern, and more secure.

I guess I’m going to have to start checking that page more often.