Microsoft cuts another feature from Windows 11 in ongoing drive to declutter the OS
Steps Recorder app is marked for removal
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Windows 11is slowly but surely getting more streamlined, withMicrosoftcutting and pruning away some of the bloat in the OS.
The most recent move, as highlighted byWindows Latest, is that the Steps Recorder app is getting its marching orders.
What’s that? We wouldn’t blame you if that was your first thought, because it was ours, as we’d forgotten about the existence of this app, which was brought in withWindows 7.
Steps Recorder, as the name suggests, allows you to record something happening on your screen, and the steps you take when running into a problem – so you can send it to an expert (or support team) who can see exactly where you’re going wrong (hopefully).
This app has just been added to thedeprecated features listfor Windows 11, on top of a bunch of other functionalitythat was recently marked for axing(most notably the Tips app).
As Microsoft notes, Steps Recorder won’t be updated any longer and will be “removed in a future release of Windows.”
The reason is that it’s pretty much redundant now with other options present in Windows 11 for screen recording duties. Microsoft points to the Snipping Tool, Xbox Game Bar, and Microsoft Clipchamp as alternatives, though some will miss the lightweight nature of Steps Recorder perhaps.
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Analysis: Getting serious about streamlining
As mentioned, this is just the latest move to declutter Windows 11 somewhat, including getting rid of the Tips app as recently announced.
Also of late we’ve seenMicrosoft removing the Windows Maps and Movies & TVapps in preview versions of Windows 11, as well asadding in the ability to uninstall more default apps(like Photos, Camera, the ones that all come preinstalled) in testing. Indeed, the latter ability has now progressed from the Canary channel in preview to Dev channel (so is heading for release, by the looks of things).
On top of that, we have other supplementarydebloating moves afoot in Windows 11, such as the introduction of the RGB hub to avoid the need to install separate apps to control your peripherals with fancy RGB lighting. That feature is now live in Windows 11 and came in with the update at the end of September.
Considering there appears to be some momentum building around this cleaning up of theoperating system, we can likely expect more pruning of Windows 11 from Microsoft going forwards, which can only be a good thing in our books.
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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