Windows constantly adds new features, and with every major facelift, an older part is deprecated. The Control Panel, first introduced in 1985 with Windows 1.0, is now being deprecated in favour of the Windows 11 Settings app. This change has been a long time coming, but Microsoft never officially stated that it’d be dropping the control panel until now.
On a support page explaining various native Windows configuration tools, Redmond has finally announced that the Control Panel “is being deprecated in favour of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience”. You’ll still see the Control Panel on your PC, though, as it still exists for “compatibility reasons” and provides access to a few settings that haven’t yet been ported to the new Settings app. Regardless, Microsoft recommends using the Settings app whenever possible.
As mentioned before, Microsoft has been trying to deprecate the Control Panel for a while. The first reports came in 2011 when a leaked Windows 8 screenshot implied that the Control Panel would be replaced with a PC Settings app. This was built with touch-friendliness in mind, and considering how big of a departure Windows 8 was from Microsoft’s usual design language, the change seemed only natural.
Later, in 2015, a senior Microsoft employee confirmed that the Settings app will eventually supersede the Control Panel. However, it still exists nearly a decade later as Redmond hasn’t managed to port over all the settings the Control Panel oversees. Windows 11 has already seen a bunch of older apps being ported over to new versions, including Notepad, Windows Explorer, and even Paint.
It’s still unclear how long the beloved panel will remain in our Windows installations, as Microsoft hasn’t announced a deprecation timeline yet, just that it’ll eventually deprecate the feature. At the moment, you can do just about everything using Windows Settings that you can with the Control Panel, so it might not take that long for the feature to disappear after all.
In the News: Google patches actively exploited Chrome vulnerability
