Windows Paint is now officially not getting updated any more [Updated]

Enlarge / Who needs Aurich's artistic talents, anyway? (credit: Peter Bright)

The venerable Windows Paint program, known to many by the name of its executable, mspaint.exe, has been marked as deprecated in the forthcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, The Guardian reports.

Deprecation states formally that the feature is no longer actively developed, and it serves as a warning that Microsoft may remove the feature in a future release. Removal isn't guaranteed, however; there are parts of the Win32 API that have been deprecated for 20 years but still haven't been removed. It's possible that Paint will continue to ship with Windows in a kind of zombie state: not subject to any active maintenance but kept around indefinitely since it's self-contained and not a security risk.

Indeed, the end of the development of Paint is not going to surprise anyone who actually uses the thing; the last time it received any non-negligible improvements was in Windows 7, when its user interface was updated to use a ribbon control. Before that, it had an interface that had been largely untouched since Windows 3.1. As such, Microsoft's official deprecation is merely confirming something that was already obvious; it's not an indicator that anything has actually changed.

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