In our earlier article, we reported that Microsoft will be discontinuing support for its Document Viewer App early next year. We now report that the company is in plans of dropping support for another of its Reader App.
The Reader app, the company says will be discontinued early next year. By discontinuing the Reader app, the company wants more users to use the default Windows 10 Browser Microsoft Edge which is a fully featured browser.
After updating to the latest version of the Reader App, users will be getting a notification when launching the application informing them about the app being discontinued or pulled in February 2018.
The app will not be usable beyond the above mentioned date and the users are hence advised to use the Microsoft Edge Browser for reading PDF, Windows XPS Viewer for XPS and Windows Photos for TIFF files.
The decision behind killing the Reader app is the company wants users to use the Edge Browser which has an inbuilt document viewer albeit slow compared to the Reader app in Windows 10 since Microsoft has been very aggressive in pushing its Edge Browser.
The Reader app which was officially made available with Windows 8 in 2012 as the default PDF viewer hasn’t been able to garner more users or viewers off late. Microsoft launched the Microsoft Edge Browser with Windows 10 already having a fully featured document viewer.
To be fair, lot of users use the Edge Browser in Windows 10 for viewing PDF documents rather than browsing as compared to Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox. So if you are one of the users who is using the Reader App and are not interested in using the Edge Browser then you have other alternatives like Adobe Acrobat Reader which is the most popular and widely used Reader application and also comes with extra features other than just viewing files.
