In a bid to deprecate the outdated and unsafe SMB1 file sharing technology on Windows, Microsoft has announced a new milestone moment. Indeed, as shared on the Microsoft Tech Community, Microsoft now says that SMB1 is now disabled by default for Windows 11 Home Insiders builds.
What this means is that heading into the near future, any Windows 11 Insiders interested in using the technology in legacy situations will have to manually enable it through the Turn Windows features on or off option. However, Microsoft is also planning to remove SMB1 binaries in a future Windows 11 release, too. For these folks, Microsoft will provide an out-of-band unsupported install package for organizations or users that still need SMB1 to connect to old factory machinery, medical gear, and consumer technology.
SMB1 technology was first deprecated by Microsoft in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, where it was not installed by default. Home and Pro versions, though, did have the option to re-enable it.
