Microsoft has made it clear that the Control Panel isn’t going away for Windows 11 and Windows 10.
If Ars Technique According to reports, this follows a series of articles last week that suggested the Control Panel, which is nearly 40 years old and contains a bunch of settings and options not found in Windows 11’s Settings app, many of which are already outdated, was in the works, claiming that Microsoft was working to finally make the Control Panel go away.
That conclusion was based largely on a sentence in a support article about system utilities in Windows, which stated, “The Control Panel is being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which provides a more modern and streamlined experience.”
This official announcement of deprecation – meaning the feature has been frozen and marked for removal (but is still present in Windows) – marks the first time we’ve heard Microsoft formally talk about kicking the Control Panel out the door. While it’s clear that this is a process the software giant has been engaged in for quite some time now – it’s simply a very slow, drawn-out death for the panel.
However, Microsoft has changed the language in that document and the Control Panel section is now reads: “Many of the settings in Control Panel are currently being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.”
The Ghost of Windows from the Past
So the focus is clearly on a different feature: there is no more talk of deprecating or marking the Control Panel for removal. We now know that porting features from the panel to the Settings app is still an ongoing process.
As Ars Technica points out, however, we don’t know the reasoning behind the wording change. Was this a formal decision that Microsoft reversed based on the reports that poured out last week (and perhaps some negative feedback from some quarters)? Or did Microsoft not make a decision at all and simply poorly worded the support document update, and as a result had to clarify what it meant – or rather, didn’t mean?
We suspect the latter, since Control Panel was never on Microsoft’s official list of deprecated features for Windows 11 (or 10). You’d expect it to appear there first, rather than such an announcement leaking out via a Windows support page.
Furthermore, we can’t quite see why Microsoft would need to reverse the decision if it had already been made – who wouldn’t want to see the back of the Control Panel, if its demise really was underway? Wandering 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. (Although, to be fair, there are some niche features in there that some users would really miss).
Anyway, to recap: Control Panel is probably going to stick around for a while, at least until the next version of Windows, whether that’s Windows 12 or something else entirely. And it’ll probably stick around for a while longer, even in that new operating system, while those more important, niche features get moved to Settings.
Please note that in the aforementioned support document, Microsoft still encourages using the Settings app instead of the Control Panel wherever possible.