Windows 11 adding native support for winRAR, 7zip, tar, and gzip

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734625/microsoft-windows-11-rar-support-native

by graypegg • 3 years ago

160 89 3 years ago

lysp• 3 years ago

But I love the WinRAR popup?

omoikane• 3 years ago

I paid for RAR back in 2004 and the same registration key still works today. Compared to the various subscription-based software these days, RAR is a way better deal.

qwertox• 3 years ago

The WinRAR license is the nicest one I have. Find that old email and open the attached RAR file and voila, it's registered. I never regretted buying it.

ourmandave• 3 years ago

Hopefully, the integration is a little better than the native ZIP support, though.

Just copy the 7zip interface in file explorer and you're done. It already feels native.

stuaxo2• 3 years ago

You could set shell= to 7zip.

brundolf• 3 years ago

Fascinating that it took this long. I wonder what org dynamics kept it from happening sooner

pwg• 3 years ago

Likely "NIH syndrome" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_syndrome

cramjabsyn• 3 years ago

Likely not considering winrar is decades old

vbgamer45• 3 years ago

It is probably a mixture of the following: is it anticompetitive, ongoing support, security. I think it is mainly anticompetitive issue.

Windows has been called many times for bundling software since it hurts other software companies. Which leads to government regulation. It is sad since I think probably the windows solution could be better in some cases with the native support.

mike_hearn• 3 years ago

Low impact. It's not the sort of thing that drives PM promotions, right? If you look at the Gates era it was all about huge ideas like replacing the fs with a database, unified RPC architectures etc. Small things like a better terminal emulator, improved zip support didn't get a look-in because you can't easily communicate them. They just sort of ambiently sit around until someone notices them and is marginally more satisfied than they were previously.

These days the big ideas have gone away, so the small polish finally gets attention.

BeFlatXIII• 3 years ago

US DoJ vs. MS

Keeps all kinds of features that are table stakes in Mac OS and Linux out of Windows b/c it's "anticompetitive" to bundle everything a user would want with an OS.

marwis• 3 years ago

Isn't libarchive streaming only which would suck for exploring large zip/7z archives?

morjom• 3 years ago

So I guess they bought out Mr. Winrar?

melony• 3 years ago

They probably pulled another Winget. Their product manager will tease an acquihire and bingo your business's stolen

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

joaonmatos• 3 years ago

Since .rar compression is still proprietary I’m guessing they’d actually have to buy out or license it.

jug2• 3 years ago

This is extraction only. RAR continues to be a proprietary format and compression will still need WinRAR. UNRAR.DLL (the RAR extraction implementation) has deliberately been free to use. Well at least as in beer.

vitorgrs4• 3 years ago

Nop. They said it will be able to create as well.

https://imgur.com/a/JiSd168

satiric2• 3 years ago

Finally. Some here are probably devoted to 7zip or winrar; I can understand that but to be honest, I'd rather it just be painless and native. Not a big deal but one less program to install on new Windows computers now.

gavaw• 3 years ago

Knowing Microsoft it's going to be one of those ugly, slow UWP apps. So I assume I will keep having to install 7zip

Alifatisk2• 3 years ago

Every UWP app I have installed has been horrible in terms of ui, half-baked & unreliable.

And these are on the M$ store too!

satiric2• 3 years ago

I was assuming it would be the same UI that they currently use for .zip, i.e. basically just the file explorer but with an extra tab for the extra functions

donmcronald• 3 years ago

Your files will be uploaded to Azure, decompressed in the cloud, and downloaded as uncompressed files.

matrix_overload2• 3 years ago

I guess Microsoft just ran out of ideas how to improve the OS itself, so they started just blatantly knocking off every popular tool in their ecosystem.

Sends a particular message to anyone considering making any tools that work with their products.

thatguy0900• 3 years ago

Do you really think it's a good idea to apply this logic to native support of a widely used 20 year old file format?

matrix_overload2• 3 years ago

Effectively killing the company that developed it. Yeah, great idea.

samyar• 3 years ago

I don't think it will kill WinRAR WinRAR has a lot of features but overall that's a very good new feature for windows who cares about other ppls money i care about myself

edflsafoiewq• 3 years ago

That's nice. Now how about support for the UTF-8 flag in ZIP? It's been 17 years.

arthur2e52• 3 years ago

It's a brand new implementation under libarchive, so I'm pretty sure utf-8 will be available too.

icegreentea2• 3 years ago

Article says they'll use libarchive to implement this. Libarchive says its .rar support is read only.

=) plenty of reason to keep win-rar around then.

I also hope wonder how they'll present .tar.gz files in the windows shell. Will you need to open the .gz, then the .tar? Or just one step. The world wonders...

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

For .tar.gz, I would just open it. Unless there's more than one file inside the .gz, which... is that even possible?

BenjiWiebe• 3 years ago

Afaik, no. That's why you use tar inside of gz, so you can have multiple files.

paddim8• 3 years ago

Why would you want to create rar archives tho?

Mountain_Skies2• 3 years ago

Perhaps they need to send archives to an automated process that only accepts rar files and no one wants to touch it to support other formats because the guy who built left the company decades ago and the system has quietly just worked without trouble over all those years.

awiesenhofer• 3 years ago

Multivolume archives, recovery options and repair features, encryption... Sooo many possible reasons to choose rar over other formats.

vitorgrs4• 3 years ago

Microsoft says it will support rar creation through...

https://imgur.com/a/JiSd168

ddmma• 3 years ago

0.001% of every Windows license will be redirected to WinRar trial foundation

mazidodo2• 3 years ago

Add a lot more Zeros here.

__turbobrew__2• 3 years ago

A few years ago I was working on optimizing scientific data delivery by switching our compression algorithms to use bzip2 instead of deflate64 for our zip files. I checked the zip standard and saw that bzip2 compression was added in 2001 so clients have had 20 years to implement it.

After changing our data delivery pipeline to bzip2 I patted myself on the back for finding an easy win which significantly reduced data size and increased compression speed. Fast forward a month or two later I get word that one of our clients is having problems uncompressing the data we sent them. It turns out that there were still windows 10 versions out in the wild that don’t support bzip2 zip files. I begrudgingly cursed windows and reverted my change, robbed of my small victory.

It truly is amazing how terrible compression support has been in windows. I could compress a +100GB data archive in under a minute using pigz, but since we had to support windows it would take over 30 minutes to compress the file using deflate. I calculated that with the space savings of gzip we could ship a gzip binary embedded with the data in a smaller size than the deflate data on its own. Unfortunately it was a no-go to ship decompression binaries with embedded data, but I thought it would be a cool idea to use cosmopolitan libc to create a platform agnostic binary which when run uses gzip/bzip/lz4 to quickly decompress the data in a platform agnostic way. I imagine such binaries would be picked up by anti-virus but it would be cool to be able to compress data with the latest algorithms without needing the client to have the matching decompression libraries.

kwanbix2• 3 years ago

Wouldn't have been easier to ask the partner to install 7zip?

jonnycomputer• 3 years ago

Ha! No, probably not.

I don't mean to be flippant. But I recently had to convert Phillips proprietary DS2 audio format file to MP3, and purchased Phillips software to do that. And then financials came down hard because it wasn't on the approved software list.

thecopy• 3 years ago

Why on earth would you think that? Have you never worked with "partners" before?:)

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

The idea of talking someone through using 7zip gives me nightmares. The fact it's multiple programs, has it's own file managers etc. Nah not worth trying to explain how to use it to a non-tech person.

I know it's a favorite program of a lot of people but personally I just think that's testament to how bad the situation is on windows.

__turbobrew__2• 3 years ago

It is easy to ask, it is nearly impossible for every partner to actually install it. Many were working in locked down environments where they would need to get some very unhelpful central IT team to approve new software and install it on workstations. Even if they could convince the central IT team to install 7zip they probably weren’t using configuration management to install it so there was a chance someone would forget to install 7zip while provisioning new workstations. Unfortunately, when you do not know who is going to consume the data you need to use the most common denominator which is still zip with deflate64.

up2isomorphism• 3 years ago

I don’t care, will not upgrade to win 11.

hn92726819• 3 years ago

People complain about their hardware not being supported by windows 11, but you know what? It's just a promise Microsoft won't force me into upgrading. So I'm glad mine isn't supported.

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

I upgraded to linux across the board. Couldnt be happier.

ChuckNorris89• 3 years ago

Thank you for your valuable on-topic insight.

kmoser• 3 years ago

Microsoft's support for regular Zip files is a mixed blessing. On the one hand you can seamlessly open a Zip file and navigate through the directory structure. On the other hand, if you're not careful, you may think you're in an actual directory, and when you try to double-click to open or edit one of the files, you end up in a confusing world of temp files.

tl;dr I wish Microsoft would make it more obvious when you're navigating a compressed file (and thus not a native directory).

16bitvoid• 3 years ago

I wish it would default to unzipping the archive to a folder with the same name in the same directory (without the pop-up window asking me where to unzip it to) when I double-click it like on macOS or most Linux file managers, but to also have a context menu option to view the contents without allowing me to actually interact with the files within.

deafpolygon• 3 years ago

Finally.

I love the seamless Explorer support.

Thev00d00• 3 years ago

I hope libarchive gets something out of this, at least a nice donation or a t-shirt.

Feels like not getting anything in return from giant corporations making billions of dollars is in the spirit of BSD style open source.

Mountain_Skies2• 3 years ago

Large companies like Microsoft want to add their own bits of code to FOSS projects so they work better in that company's context. if nothing else, the project will receive code contributions.

anaganisk2• 3 years ago

It's just the side effects of capitalism. Companies don't give a damn about how they are affecting climate and habitats, do we really want to expect them to support FOSS

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

Open source libraries need to include a clause preventing anyone turning more than X amount in revenue per year or training machine learning from using the code unless they pay a fee.

gorkish• 3 years ago

/facepalm

Clamchop• 3 years ago

Your software is now source-available.

majkinetor• 3 years ago

Why?

I think its perfectly OK for big companies to use FOSS tools without contributing anything. Why do you care? Authors gave it to the world for free or they would use more restrictive licence.

If the big company really wants some more stuff in it, they will probably contribute or donate anyway.

To me, it seems this is irrelevant methaphysical question that those that don't understand FOSS constantly try to empose. Once you accept money, its a different game, with money comes expectations... If you can't do something for free, and you expect to be payed for everything, you are probably not the one that will advance the field.

I admire people that passionatelly do stuff for nothing but pure passion and sence of accomplishment. That is the world I want to live in.

Yeah, there are predators, but if you really care about it you can probably create defensive strategy to minimize those chances.

sangnoir• 3 years ago

Now every open source project needs an accounting system, a bookkeeper and register to pay taxes in multiple jurisdictions, for what may be a pittance in fees earned.

If the project is not going full-tilt as a startup, then that juice might not be worth the squeeze. Do maintainers want to add administrative duties to their plate just to maybe preemptively knee-cap large tech companies? If I this were to become a reality and I were a decision maker at a large tech company, I'd opt to pay you from the Japanese subsidiary - just 'cause.

rolivercoffee• 3 years ago

I really hope this includes being able to use AES encryption.

mazidodo2• 3 years ago

Nobody wants you to use any encryption, let alone good encryption.

Alifatisk2• 3 years ago

I’m slowly shifting to zstd and it is installable with 7z!

signal11• 3 years ago

You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.

This will be interesting to test. When I last tried this on Windows 10, 7-zip beat Windows handily at decompressing large zip files.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

How long until they succumb to the temptation and now that they have embraced these formats start extending them?

Havoc• 3 years ago

That seems like a great step forward in usability

tssva• 3 years ago

I assume this means new integration with the Windows shell since Microsoft has provided cli support since the December 2017 preview build of Windows 10 by shipping libarchive and bsdtar with Windows.

anjel• 3 years ago

As .Ogg and .Opus continue to get the cold shoulder from windows "explorer"

sebbu• 3 years ago

even .webp isn't natively supported (i mean, by microsoft photos and windows photo viewer)

anaganisk2• 3 years ago

Funny how just by renaming the extension to JPEG it works.

vitorgrs4• 3 years ago

Windows supports it fine. https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N5TDP8VCMHS

landgenoot• 3 years ago

That's nice, because my WinRAR 40-day trial is about to expire.

dengolius• 3 years ago

meh, they forgot to add zst and lz4..

Windows 11 adding native support for winRAR, 7zip, tar, and gzip

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