With an upcoming version of Windows 11, Microsoft will soon add Native support for RAR, 7-Zip, and GZ archives.
If you have been using the Windows OS for a while then you might know that all of the aforementioned apps are far better at dealing with compressed files and folders in comparison to native Windows solutions.
In a new blog post, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay stated that,
“We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-Zip, RAR, gz, and many others using the libarchive open-source project.”
He further added,
“You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.”
You will be surprised to know that, Microsoft integrated ZIP archives support into Windows in 1998.
That said to manage and open these files users still needed third-party software like 7-Zip (.7z), RAR (.rar), or gz (.gz) archives.
With future Windows 11 updates, we can even expect native support for other mainstream formats like TAR and bzip2.