Andrew Cunningham
Buried among the many AI bulletins and minor Windows 11 function tweaks that Microsoft introduced yesterday was an addition that will remedy a minor however longstanding headache for Windows customers: The working system is lastly shifting past .zip archive support and will soon be gaining the flexibility to work with RAR, 7-zip, .tar, and many other sorts of archives.
Built-in support for these completely different archive sorts will be particularly related for builders and individuals who use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, each cases the place non-zip compressed archives are extra generally used.
Microsoft informed The Verge that the function can be added “later this week” to a “work-in-progress” construct; it might or is probably not unique to Windows Insider preview builds earlier than rolling out to most of the people.
Microsoft added native support for .zip information—then and now, the commonest kind of compressed archive—to Windows Me again within the 12 months 2000, although most individuals encountered it in 2001’s Windows XP. But other sorts of archives nonetheless required downloading and putting in a separate app like 7-Zip or WinRAR and its infinite “40-day” trial.
Microsoft’s compressed file support will be dealt with by the open supply libarchive mission, and the listing of file sorts that may be compressed and extracted will presumably match the listing on libarchive’s GitHub web page. It looks like libarchive will be dealing with zip information in Windows, too—the corporate promised “improved efficiency of archive performance throughout compression” together with the support for extra file codecs. Decompressing giant zip archives with Windows’ native instruments has at all times been a bit slower than in some third-party apps.
There will nonetheless be room within the Windows world for apps like 7-Zip, which nonetheless helps a ton of file codecs and has extra versatile and customizable menu shortcuts, amongst other options. After all, WinZip is outwardly nonetheless a factor, even 20 years after Microsoft added native .zip support to Windows.