Microsoft has clarified that Windows 11 and Windows 10 are not about to see the Control Panel disappear.
As Ars Technica reports, this follows a series of articles that appeared last week around the nearly 40-year-old Control Panel — which is home to a ton of settings and options not covered in Windows 11's Settings app, many of which are legacy issues — insisting that Microsoft was in the process of killing it off, finally.
That conclusion was based largely on a sentence in a support article about system tools in Windows that said: “The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”
This official announcement of the discontinuation (i.e. the feature is frozen and marked for removal, but still present in Windows) was the first time we've heard Microsoft formally talk about taking the Control Panel out the door. While it's been made pretty clear that this is the process the software giant is engaged in, and has been doing for a long time now, it's simply a very slow and drawn-out death for the panel.
However, Microsoft has changed the language in that document, and the Control Panel section now reads: “Many of the Control Panel settings are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”
The ghost of Windows past
The shift in emphasis is clear, then, moving away from any talk of deprecating or flagging the Control Panel for removal, and letting us know that lifting and moving features from the Panel to the Settings app is still an ongoing process.
However, as Ars Technica points out, we don't know the reason behind the change in wording. Was this a formal decision that Microsoft has since reversed based on reports that surfaced last week (and perhaps some negative feedback from some quarters)? Or did Microsoft make no decision at all and simply poorly worded the update to the support document, and as a result had to clarify what it meant (or, rather, what it didn't mean)?
We strongly suspect the latter is the case, because Control Panel has never been on Microsoft's official list of deprecated features for Windows 11 (or 10), and you'd think it would appear there first, rather than in an announcement like this one leaked via a Windows support page.
Plus, we don't understand why Microsoft would have to reverse the decision, if it made it at all, anyway. Who wouldn't want to see the end of the Control Panel, if its demise were really happening? Walking through the various sections of the Control Panel is a bit like being haunted by old versions of Windows, with features and interface graphics that date back to the 1990s. (Though, to be fair, there are some niche features here that some users would really miss.)
In any case, to sum up: Control Panel will likely be with us for quite some time, at least until the next version of Windows, be it Windows 12 or something else entirely. And it will likely remain in place for a while even in that new OS, while those more important niche functions move to Settings.
Please note that in the mentioned support document, Microsoft still recommends people use the Settings app, rather than Control Panel, whenever possible.
