Thursday, May 25th 2023
Windows 11 Quietly Updated with Support for RAR Archive File Format
Microsoft has been hyping up a new implementation of AI assistance into its flagship operating system - Windows 11 - this week, but a keen-eyed journalist has noticed an interesting tidbit placed in plain sight amongst all of the artificial intelligence bluster. Those who have legitimately purchased the WinRAR archiver extractor tool within the past few days should look away now. Within the announcement of a Windows 11 Co-Pilot, under the section named "Reducing toil and unlocking the fun and joy of development on Windows with new features and improvements," Panos Panay (the chief product officer) mentions an unexpected addition: "We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."
It is slightly amusing that it has taken Microsoft's engineers almost three decades to add native support for RAR files in their OS product environment - it should be noted that Windows 10 is not getting this exclusive treatment, after all the company's product managers are encouraging folks to get onto 11 to enjoy all of the latest fun features. It is perhaps not great news for the developer of this archive file format - RARLAB proclaims on their site: "With over 500 million users worldwide, WinRAR is the world's most popular compression tool! There is no better way to compress files for efficient and secure file transfer. Providing fast email transmission and well-organized data storage options, WinRAR also offers solutions for users working in all industries and sectors." Windows users have often joked about getting the most out of time-limited shareware versions of the WinRAR suite, but not many have actually purchased it - will the small update to Windows 11 impact RARLAB's sales figures in the immediate future?
Source:
Tech Crunch
It is slightly amusing that it has taken Microsoft's engineers almost three decades to add native support for RAR files in their OS product environment - it should be noted that Windows 10 is not getting this exclusive treatment, after all the company's product managers are encouraging folks to get onto 11 to enjoy all of the latest fun features. It is perhaps not great news for the developer of this archive file format - RARLAB proclaims on their site: "With over 500 million users worldwide, WinRAR is the world's most popular compression tool! There is no better way to compress files for efficient and secure file transfer. Providing fast email transmission and well-organized data storage options, WinRAR also offers solutions for users working in all industries and sectors." Windows users have often joked about getting the most out of time-limited shareware versions of the WinRAR suite, but not many have actually purchased it - will the small update to Windows 11 impact RARLAB's sales figures in the immediate future?
35 Comments on Windows 11 Quietly Updated with Support for RAR Archive File Format
That "Buy Winrar" button in their websites brings to the 7zip homepage. ;)
Winzip allows to use opencl to speedup things and I can tell that it's blazing fast when the program makes use of it. I mean, seconds instead of minutes to compress the same giant archive, compared to winrar and 7zip.
Unfortunally the program is a mess, full of crap. Every time you right click to a folder/file to compress it, it opens the main window of the program and there is no way to make it behave like the competitors. Also, to benefit from opencl, one has to use their .zipx format and (in my experience) this often lead to errors when opening them with winzip or other programs.
But a 7zip/winrar version with gpu acceleration would be a blast for me.
...may have just dated myself.
Instead of wasting resources on something trivial like this, why not bring back the option to disable Grouping on the taskbar, you know ... that thing EVERY other Windows version had, that allowed you to click right on the open file you wanted directly, without hovering for a second first. What'sd the point of the large taskbar then? Wasted space.
Uggg ... Windows 11 ... the OS with more clicks, less productivity. Just because they can.
Also, I still use winrar... Not often, but it happens.
WinRAR license seems to be a lifetime license
GitHub - facebook/zstd: Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm
The problem is how do you open these files? The biggest thing zip has going for it is everyone knows what one is and can open it.
Even given an .7z file and it really reduces the amount of people that can interact with the file.
Also windows has had some horrible bug where unzipping zip is stupidly slow... really no excuse here...
Explorer Zip uncompress very slow · Issue #91 · microsoft/Windows-Dev-Performance · GitHub
I've installed peazip to try .zstandard: it's free and well done if anyone is interested.
.zstandard is fast, yes, with the default option 3, or with 5: the moment that you increase the level of compression it becomes slow like the others.
With this format you can compress one file only. When there are many files, the program needs to put these into a .tar archive and then compress this with .zstandard. So when you double click on the archive to see what's inside, peazip will open two windows, one after the other. But it's not a big deal.
The regular 7zip gives me errors extracting the .zst archive, while winrar doesn't.
Peazip can test the archive automatically after its creation, but doesn't seem to have the option to include recovery data in it. This function is missing also in 7zip. Winrar instead can do both things.
Also, peazip doesn't offer the option to create automatically .zst archives, but gives the "add to archive" option in the explorer menu and then opens the main program window: something that I don't like at all.
One thing that winrar does best and fast is the creation of cbr/cbz archives: the format used to pack the comics. For this you have to select the images and compress them in .zip, then change the final extension in cbr/cbz. 7zip and peazip can't do this, doesn't work. In winrar takes three seconds.
But based on what I've read here and at TechCrunch, I think MS did just that, so there will be compression too available in Windows. Not without nag screens, hah.
Btw, winrar supports rar version 5 type archives and... I really doubt MS does, because the library they based it on does not.
This means it probably can't open any of ghe latest rar archives made by winrar, with major compression benefits. There are open source and legal reverse engineered versions of the original bone standard rar format. This is what MS used.
We've gone from NOT PAYING FOR WINRAR to REALLY NOT PAYING FOR WINRAR.