While casually looking for updates in the Microsoft Store, I noticed a new update for Cortana after a long time. But, instead of improving things, the latest update caused the app to stop working on Windows 11. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering that Microsoft’s assistant hasn’t received a single feature update in the past two years
Microsoft has finally killed Cortana on Windows 11 – its Windows Phone-era assistant that debuted on desktop with Windows 10. Cortana app was the tech giant’s response to Siri in 2014, and Microsoft published a series of advertisements targeting Apple’s powerful assistant.
Did anyone even use this feature? It always felt like an awful “me too!” feature trying to be edgy.
I didn’t mind the search capability in the start menu… what I did hate is when it started suggesting URLs instead of the applications I wanted to run.
Like NO, I search int he browser I start applications from the task bar… get it straight!
I would not mind web integration, if that was secondary.
When I search for an app, it should come up first, even if it is only a near match. Having an additional web results section would be nice to have, especially if it were launching my desired browser (not Edge).
But they have essentially replaced the Start Menu with Bing Search on Edge, which was not we were looking for.
I used cortana once years ago to see what it could do, Then forgot about it. It’s just another thing taking up space that can’t be uninstalled. Hopefully they will allow the full removal of it in Windows 10 too. And while they are at it I wouldn’t mind removing all the xbox stuff. So much bloat these days.
It is uninstallable through powershell just as many other apps found in windows 10 that is “uninstallable”
First thing i do on any new PC is to run “Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage” in an administrator powershell to remove all shitty applications they pre-packaged on the system.
I submitted this news to osnews back in spring when paul thurrot wrote about it. Perhaps it got lost in spam or something.