[samspot]

It's hard for me to imagine anyone balking at this feature. My core note taking workflow frequently involves:

1. Note about blah 2. Paste link to blah 3. Open that link later when reviewing my notes.

Blah is sometimes a web link, sometimes a link to a doc on my system, and sometimes a link to an item in my todo tracker. The better analogy is this is like a pencil having an eraser built in.

I use Drafts instead of Notepad, but if I used Notepad I would want to be able to easily open links in my notes. When I do find myself in Notepad, it's because I double clicked on a readme file that often contains links to resources I need.

[delusional]

But then notepad wouldn't be fetching the content. While I would still prefer notepad to be simple, and just making you copy paste the link, I would expect it to forward a link a browser, or something. I would not expect notepad to go out and fetch random content from the internet.

[samspot]

I read the bug as notepad can launch unsafe links by delegating them to the OS to open.

[derefr]

Notepad stuck around in Windows for so long, despite Wordpad also being built-in, because Notepad was supposed to be for e.g. editing C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT or C:\Windows\System32\hosts.txt in Safe Mode. It was basically supposed to be the /bin/sh to Wordpad's /bin/bash — the thing that'll save you in maintenance mode when the system is so hosed that nothing more complex will launch.

If your computer was working, there was never really supposed to be a reason to invoke Notepad. Programmers were expected to install IDEs or third-party text-editor software. Microsoft's own READMEs have always been .rtfs ever since Windows 95. And so on. For a little while, you might use it to view system log files? But the Windows NT lineage gave Windows an Event subsystem with its own MMC-based console, so even that didn't require Notepad any more.

It's therefore bizarre that Microsoft have decided to "enhance" Notepad into this pseudo-rich-text thing, while also sunsetting Wordpad; when it seems like what they really wanted was to "enhance" Wordpad to also do what Notepad does, while sunsetting Notepad. (Even with full back-compat, they could have done this by making Notepad.exe a stub that launched Wordpad.exe with flags.)