Vole announced that Visual Basic Scripting Edition has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client."

"In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on-demand before its removal from the operating system."

For those who came in very late, VBScript debuted in 1996, and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates to 2010.

It is a scripting language and was widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006.

Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition bought active scripting to various environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service.

Vole never convinced other browser makers to support VBScript, so web developers tended to use JavaScript for client-side tasks outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments.