Microsoft Paint won’t be banished to oblivion—for now

One of technology’s last truly innocent creations just got an 11th hour reprieve. 

Microsoft Paint, the 33-year old program released with the first version of Windows back in 1985, is not being banished to the oblivion of the Windows Store after all — news that is sure to warm the cockles of many an elderly digital Seurat’s heart. 

The program was added to Microsoft’s “deprecated” list back in 2017, and in the summer of that year Microsoft insisted that MS Paint would always be available for download in the Windows Store. However, unbundling it from Windows appeared to many like step one in a two-step process of removing it from life support. 

Well, MS Paint will live to ride another day. Brandon LeBlanc, a senior program manager at Microsoft, confirmed the news via Twitter on April 22. 

“Yes, MSPaint will be included in [latest Windows update] 1903,” he wrote. “It’ll remain included in Windows 10 for now.”

The question as to why Microsoft decided to do us all this solid remains unresolved. We reached out to the company, but received no response as of press time. Perhaps a lot of people still use it to make screenshots?

Regardless, there are a couple of important caveats in LeBlanc’s statement. Namely, the idea of “for now.” This clearly suggests that the days of painstakingly creating devastating visual owns of your dumb friends pixel by pixel are numbered. Because, and let’s be real here, very few people are going to trek their way over to the Windows Store to download this thing when it’s ultimately unbundled from some future version of the operating system. 

But hey, that’s something for future generations to worry about. Now excuse me while I go spend the rest of my day lost in the eyes of this pixelated kitten.