Cancel your WinRAR trial: Windows will soon support RAR, gz, 7z, and other archives

Buried among the many AI bulletins and minor Windows 11 feature tweaks that Microsoft announced yesterday was an addition that may clear up a minor however longstanding headache for Home windows customers: The working system is lastly transferring past .zip archive help and can quickly be gaining the flexibility to work with RAR, 7-zip, .tar, and lots of different kinds of archives.

Constructed-in help for these completely different archive sorts shall be particularly related for builders and individuals who use the Home windows Subsystem for Linux, each cases the place non-zip compressed archives are extra generally used.

Microsoft told The Verge that the function could be added “later this week” to a “work-in-progress” construct; it might or might not be unique to Home windows Insider preview builds earlier than rolling out to most people.

Microsoft added native help for .zip information—then and now, the commonest kind of compressed archive—to Home windows Me again within the 12 months 2000, although most individuals encountered it in 2001’s Home windows XP. However different kinds of archives nonetheless required downloading and putting in a separate app like 7-Zip or WinRAR and its countless “40-day” trial.

Microsoft’s compressed file help shall be dealt with by the open source libarchive project, 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 as if libarchive shall be dealing with zip information in Home windows, too—the corporate promised “improved efficiency of archive performance throughout compression” together with the help for added file codecs. Decompressing giant zip archives with Home windows’ native instruments has all the time been a bit slower than in some third-party apps.

There’ll nonetheless be room within the Home windows world for apps like 7-Zip, which nonetheless helps a ton of file codecs and has extra versatile and customizable menu shortcuts, amongst different options. In any case, WinZip is apparently still a thing, even twenty years after Microsoft added native .zip help to Home windows.