Last week it looked like Microsoft had confirmed that it was killing off the Control Panel and handing over the reins to the Settings app — a process that’s been in various phases of transition since the launch of Windows 8 12 years ago. But it might not be quite as simple as that.
The announcement claimed originally that “The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Setting app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience”. This is essentially a death warrant, with "deprecation" meaning a feature is frozen and marked for removal — even if it’s currently still available. But things have since changed (via Ars Technica).
The language now says that “Many of the settings in the Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.” It’s not entirely clear why the language has changed, but that does suggest that the Control Panel will be surviving just a little bit longer. Though how long isn’t entirely clear.
No doubt Microsoft still has plans to make the Settings app take over Control Panel’s role in the future. It’s been going on for a long time and the language suggests that the process will be continuing in the immediate future. But it’s still unclear why Microsoft would reverse course like this. Rumors of previous attempts to kill off the Control Panel have been controversial, and Microsoft should have foreseen the backlash to any new announcements.
But it's also worth noting that since the Control Panel has never been on an official list of Deprecated features for Windows 10 or 11, then it’s possible that this was a simple mistake. After all, the support pages are not really the appropriate place for these kinds of announcements. Even if they are announcements that we know are going to happen eventually.
So expect things to continue happening as they have done over the past 12 years, with the Control Panel slowly losing functionality as more and more features are added to the Settings menu. And once that process is completed, only then are we likely to see the Control Panel actually vanish for good.
But who knows when that might be. We might even be talking about using Windows 12 by that point.
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