Because, you know, nobody is actually using it

Dec 15, 2018 19:47 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is getting ready to abandon another Windows 10 feature, mostly as the result of only a few people actually using it.

This is what Twitter user Albacore, who has a good track on Windows scoops, says in a recent post, explaining that Microsoft is planning to ditch the People bar in Windows 10 19H1.

While Microsoft hasn’t yet announced the change, a deprecation notification is projected to be introduced in a future Windows 10 19H1 preview build to be released to insiders in early 2019.

“In upcoming 19H1 Insider builds, the People Bar will show a deprecation notice. It's a shame to see something like this with rather interesting engineering behind it kick the bucket,” the tweet reads.

Windows 10 19H1 ready in spring of 2019

The People bar was introduced in Windows 10 as a neat way to add your favorite contacts to the taskbar in order to access apps for quick communication a lot faster. The People bar supports apps like Mail and Skype, but as it turns out, not a lot of users actually rely on it these days.

To be honest, I’m not using the People bar either, but this is mostly because of the lack of options that this feature suffers from. Developers haven’t embraced the feature, so it has barely evolved since Microsoft implemented it in Windows 10, which makes the decision to pull it pretty much the only way to go.

Windows 10 19H1 is projected to be finalized in March 2019, and insiders will be the first to get the RTM build. The public rollout should kick off in April and will take place in stages as it currently happens with the October update too.

As for the preview builds to bring the deprecation notification, they will most likely land in early 2019, when Microsoft should also start pushing 19H1 builds to the Slow ring.