Windows will soon support RAR, gz, 7z, and other archives – Ars Technica

Buried between artificial intelligence announcements and minor Windows 11 feature tweaks that Microsoft announced yesterday was an addition that would solve a simple but long-standing problem for Windows users: the operating system is finally skipping support for .zip archives and will soon gain the ability to work with RAR, 7-zip, and . tar and many other types of archives.

The built-in support for these different types of archives will be particularly convenient for developers and people using the Windows subsystem for Linux, both cases where uncompressed compressed archives are more commonly used.

Microsoft Edge said that the feature will be added “later this week” to an “in-progress” build; It may or may not be exclusive to Windows Insider Preview builds before it’s released to the general public.

Microsoft added native support for .zip files—the most popular type of compressed archive then and now—to Windows Me in 2000, although most people encountered it in 2001’s Windows XP. But other types of archives still require downloading and installing a separate application. like 7-zip Or WinRAR and its endless “40 days” trial.

Support for compressed files from Microsoft will be handled by The libarchive is an open source project, and the list of file types that can be compressed and extracted will match the list on the libarchive’s GitHub page. It looks like libarchive will handle compressed files in Windows, too — the company promises to “improve archive functionality during compression” along with support for additional file formats. Decompressing large zip archives using native Windows tools has always been a bit slower than some third-party applications.

There’s still room in the Windows world for apps like 7-Zip, which still support plenty of file formats and have more flexible and customizable menu shortcuts, among other features. After all, WinZip is It seems still a thingeven two decades after Microsoft added native zip support for Windows.