- Microsoft has moved another part of the Control Panel to Settings
- This happened in the latest Windows 11 preview
- Don’t expect the migration of the entire Control Panel to happen anytime soon, however, as Microsoft has bigger things to do this year.
Windows 11 is bringing another feature from the old Control Panel to the Settings app.
Windows Central noticed that a regular Microsoft watcher on
However, while the moved functionality may now be in Settings, it doesn’t actually work yet. Microsoft is still rolling out the feature in Windows 11 build 26300.7877, which arrived late last week in the development channel.
While this is a relatively small migration, it’s nice to have this option moved from the Control Panel. People can see it in the Settings app, while most people don’t go near the old-school Control Panel anymore.
Analysis: a painfully slow process
If you’re wondering: why does Control Panel still exist? That’s because there are a ton of legacy options in the dusty corners of this part of the Windows 11 interface, so it’s no easy job sorting out what should be moved to the Settings app and what should be left aside in the name of optimization. It’s also the case that some of the more complicated panels don’t translate easily to the cleaner lines of the modern Settings app.
As you’ve probably noticed, Microsoft’s migration of features from Control Panel to Settings has been very slow, to say the least. What we’re seeing are occasional trickles of features, like this single option, being carried over.
Microsoft should really pick up the pace of this work, because it’s embarrassing how slow progress has been on this front. It’s far from ideal to suddenly be faced with a jarring legacy interface in Windows 11 when you’re trying to tweak a less-used option, and frankly, it gives the operating system an unfinished feel.
Unfortunately, the pace of change with Control Panel is unlikely to accelerate, given Microsoft’s promise to fix the fundamentals of Windows 11 (the bugs, quirks, and underperforming parts of the desktop interface) this year. Between that campaign and hopefully beefing up the bug checking (quality assurance) part of Windows 11, I can’t imagine there will be many resources to deal with the Control Panel migration. If anything, I can see this work stopping in 2026.
In short, don’t hold your breath for the day when Control Panel is permanently and irreversibly removed from Microsoft’s desktop operating system. We’ll be lucky if this happens before the end of the decade.
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