Microsoft appears to be tearing away another piece from the Control Panel in Windows 11, moving it to the Settings app, as the slow death of the legacy panel continues.

This time, it’s the Control Panel’s mouse options that are being ported over to the Settings app, although it must be noted that this isn’t a change in testing for Windows 11 yet.

In fact, the move is hidden away in a new build of Windows Server (that emerged last week), so not even Windows 11 – but it’s likely that if it does happen with the former, it’ll happen across all Windows variants.

The discovery was made by PhantomOfEarth, a well-known presence in the world of Microsoft leaks on X, who found the clues in Windows Server build 26376.

As the post shows, the in-depth options in the mouse properties dialog in the legacy Control Panel have been shifted to Settings, including the likes of pointer trails and customization, and the ability to boost pointer precision (or speed).

Windows Latest noticed this development and also pointed out that these various bits of functionality are currently scattered across a couple of different panels in the Settings app (Accessibility, and Bluetooth & Devices).

What’s equally clear is how much nicer and cleaner the options look now that they're safely ensconced in the Settings app, compared to the rather jarringly old appearance of the Control Panel, of course.

Analysis: Mouse over

The scattered nature of the way this has been implemented thus far (in the background) feels rather messy, but as noted, this isn’t even in Windows 11 yet, and the work is hidden away in Windows Server. This means that Microsoft is likely going to organize things in a neater manner when the move comes through to testing for Windows 11 – if it does, I might add.

Hidden changes like this may not always be realized, but then it does make sense to port over the mouse options from the Control Panel. In fact, I’d say this is long overdue, really, as it’s a reasonably important array of choices, and what you get in Settings right now for mouse-related tweaking is very much barebones (with a link to the rest of the options in the Control Panel, which feels very clunky).

Furthermore, Microsoft does clearly have a plan to lift and shift the old Control Panel's contents over to Settings, so the former’s days are clearly numbered – even if that number is likely to be quite a high one.

Why do I say that? Because the Control Panel has a whole bunch of stuff that’s quite niche, but still perhaps vital to some users – particularly those in the business world – nestling under the hood. So, it’s no small task to navigate that maze of features and decide what’s going where, and what might need to eventually get the chop.

The process of migrating Control Panel features to the Settings app has been underway for a long, long time now, and has been very slow. Indeed, Microsoft only kicked off this drive in earnest back in 2020, when the System page of the Control Panel began redirecting users to the Settings app in Windows 10 – and things have moved rather sluggishly since.

I’m even doubtful Microsoft will be ready to can the Control Panel completely when the next incarnation of Windows rolls around, whatever the successor to Windows 11 might be called.

At any rate, as I’ve already said, I wouldn’t leap to conclusions based on these clues in the Windows Server OS. However, it seems likely that the in-depth mouse options are the next piece of the Control Panel to be moved in Windows 11, although exactly how that transfer will be implemented, we’ll have to wait and see for now.

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