Microsoft’s Build 2023 has brought in numerous innovations, including an expansion of the integrated Windows ZIP tool that will now support significant archive and compression formats. Windows and Devices product department head, Panos Panay, first casually hinted at this development within a subordinate clause in the Miscellaneous section of Windows Developer. In the Build Conference blog post, he explains that native support for additional archive formats, such as .tar, 7-zip, .rar, and .gz among many others, has been added by leveraging the libarchive open-source project, with the result that users can now expect improved overall performance of the archive functions during compression.
Libarchive supports numerous formats that Windows can at least unpack without additional programs, both unpacking and building .tar, .pax, cpio, ISO9660, .zip, mtree, .ar, .xar, 7-Zip and WARC formats. While the library can only unpack the formats of .lha, .lza, .rar (original format and RAR v5), and .cab, most Windows users will no longer need to install other compression programs, such as WinRAR, 7-Zip, or any similar software. Libarchive assures users of further improvements, including the use of WinZip AES 128 and 256 encryption, despite being considered insecure, and thread safety, except on platforms where the C library does not offer this.
Although Microsoft has yet to provide concrete information regarding these developments, the corporation hopes that Windows will use more than one processor core for archive processing in the future, thus matching their promised better compression performance. At present, it remains unclear when these improvements will be available to all users, although Panay disclosed that some of the features are available in the new Windows Insider Preview this week. The Moments 3 update for Windows 11 may already include these improved features.
