At the Microsoft Build 2023 event held early this morning Beijing time, in addition to announcing a series of AI progress and functions, Microsoft also specifically mentioned that it will natively add decompression support for compressed file formats such as RAR and 7Z in the Windows 11 system.
When we talk about compressed files, the most familiar file formats should be RAR, 7Z, and ZIP. Among them, RAR is the abbreviation of Roshal Archive , which was created by Russian engineer Eugene Roshal in 1993. Afterwards, the still popular WinRAR software was developed and has been continuously updated until now.
At present, Microsoft has not added native support for decompressing RAR and 7Z formats for Windows. Users who want to decompress RAR and 7Z files on Windows devices need to use decompression software such as WinRAR, 7-Zip, and Bandizip, but this will happen in the future will change.
Microsoft revealed that this support was added because Windows 11 now uses the libarchive open source project.
libarchive is an open source C library designed to provide reading and writing support for a variety of different compressed formats. It supports many common compression formats and provides many advanced features such as encryption, digital signatures, multi-volume support and more. The main advantage of libarchive is its cross-platform support, it can run on various operating systems including Linux, Windows, macOS, etc. It also provides bindings for multiple languages, such as Python, Ruby, Perl, etc., so that developers can easily use it in their favorite programming languages.
It is also because of the use of open source solutions provided by libarchive that Windows 11 will also support tar, gz and many other formats.
Microsoft will begin adding support for these file formats in an upcoming Windows 11 preview build, due out later this week. Although Windows will natively support the decompression of the above-mentioned formats, it is not yet possible to use the RAR format to compress files, which means that users still need to install programs such as WinRAR on their computers in case of emergency.