Remember when Notepad was just… Notepad? A simple text editor nobody asked to be modernized?
Yeah, Microsoft didn’t care either. They bolted on Markdown support and AI features anyway. And now we’ve got CVE-2026-20841. Remote code execution. Via a text file. This is the kind of thing that makes you go “oh come on, really?”
You know what’s really stupid about this
Notepad existed for decades, resisting the general trend of Microsoft software, and it continued to do one thing, and do it well (for the purposes of this argument, let’s not get started on line endings)
If someone wanted to do more than just view text files, there was wordpad, a stripped down word processor, that would have been the perfect application to add support for markdown to.
Except they killed it, because enough people must have realised that the word processor bundled with the OS did everything they needed without having to pay Microsoft a subscription for Word.
So now Microsoft is trying to turn notepad into the rudimentary word processor that people expect to come with their OS, destroying the aspect that made it useful
Yes but I bet the young developers at Microslop have never used notepad or wordpad or even windows 95, so they think the best apps are made in electron with JavaScript, or in dotnet.
I actually think the young crowd at MS would resist this. This looks much more like a top-down decision from marketing overruling engineering.
Yeah true.
Aww! But, Mom…!
Mom: we have \n at home.
At home: \r
Oh, so that’s the reason you & Dad are always fighting!
When one realizes that anything useful a firm does is just a coincidence of it making profit. 💢