What's Deprecated or Removed from Parallels Desktop 15

[Maria@Parallels]

What's Deprecated or Removed from Parallels Desktop 15
More than 5 million users rely on Parallels Desktop around the world. That's why our goal is to ensure that our engineering teams are focused on providing the greatest benefit to the largest number of users. In addition to expanding Parallels Desktop functionality, we must ensure that an extensive list of existing features continues to work flawlessly in the ever-changing environment of Mac and Windows. For this reason, we must prioritize our engineering efforts.

This year we decided to deprecate or remove little-used or not-used features from Parallels Desktop. The Parallels Team uses statistics collected from those who agreed to participate in the Customer Experience Program. If you care about usage scenarios being counted, please make sure you have it enabled in the Parallels Desktop Preferences.

Below you can find two lists: one is for deprecated features and the other for removed.

Deprecated features continue working in Parallels Desktop 15 but will no longer be supported and will be removed in the next versions of Parallels Desktop.

Removed features are no longer available in Parallels Desktop 15. They were removed either because they are no longer supported in the latest operating systems or not used at all (<50 vs 5 million users around the world).

Most of these features are not business critical, and there are alternate ways to achieve the desired effect.

Deprecated Features

• Adding Windows applications to LaunchPad

This functionality is no longer supported because the API is no longer available in macOS 10.15 Catalina. There's no way to easily remove non-App Store applications from LaunchPad.

• Coherence for Linux

Your Linux virtual machine may work in Coherence mode but this view mode is no longer supported. According to the statistics, it's a rarely used feature but rather complicated to support. Instead, we've decided to invest more resources in running Linux in Window mode, Linux 3D acceleration, etc.

• Keeping Internet Explorer and Edge passwords in Mac Keychain

We think it's a useful feature because it allows you to share passwords among virtual machines, but we cannot support it anymore because of the internal changes in Windows browsers. It already doesn't work in Internet Explorer and will likely stop working in Edge soon.

Removed features:

• Using self-made encryption plugins

Parallels Desktop allows you to encrypt your virtual machine data. By default, it is done with the AES encryption algorithm. But you could also use your own encryption plugin. This functionality is removed, as it was not used.

• Checkbox in virtual machine configuration to control access to your current location

In the latest versions of macOS, access to your current location is controlled per application via the system policy. An additional checkbox in the virtual machine configuration could be useful only if a user wants to allow access to location in one virtual machine and prohibit in others. However, this checkbox was removed due to very low usage.

• Windows 8 notifications in the macOS Notification Center

As most users switched to Windows 10 (where this feature doesn't work), it was removed from the code and testing. If you think you need this feature in Windows 10, please let us know on the Feature Suggestions Forum.

• Power menu for Windows 8.1 in Coherence

As most users switched to Windows 10 (where this feature doesn't work), it was removed from the code and testing. If you think you need this feature in Windows 10, please let us know on the Feature Suggestions Forum.

• Showing cloud storage drives in the Windows Office "Save As" menu

This feature doesn't work in modern Office packages--only in Office 2013. If you use Microsoft Office 2013, you can still save files to the Mac-connected cloud folders that are displayed in File Explorer as Shared Folders.

• Call with iPhone by right-clicking a phone number in Internet Explorer

This feature was removed due to low usage.

• macOS "Share" menu in the Internet Explorer context menu

This feature was removed due to low usage.

• Finder tags for Parallels Desktop

This feature was removed due to complaints and low usage.

• Spoken commands

This feature was removed because Apple is introducing Voice Control in macOS 10.15 Catalina, which offers far more possibilities. We'd better invest resources into it.

• Switching the level of 3D acceleration for Windows

A special checkbox in configuration of Windows virtual machines allowed you to disable or change the level of 3D acceleration in Windows. Most users worked with the default setting and the checkbox was removed due to very low usage.