After Winrar, has Microsoft signed the death warrant for 7-Zip?

The last Windows Build conference was an opportunity to present many new features. Among these, there will be changes to be expected for the file explorer.

The Build conference organized at the start of the week was very rich in innovations. We were obviously able to discover the flagship products of the event, namely the manufacturer’s PCs powered by AI, as well as the unexpected Release Preview release of Windows 11 24H2. But changes that can be seen as taking up less space, while perhaps being more historic, have also been announced. Like new upcoming support for the 7-zip format in File Explorer.

Zip compression soon to compete

Currently, when you want to quickly compress a file on Windows, you simply right-click on it and click on the entry to compress to ZIP format. A possibility that has hardly changed since the beginning of the 2000s… which will soon no longer be the case!

Indeed, the file explorer is undergoing an interesting development, since it will in the future also be able to compress in TAR and 7-zip formats. This possibility should be offered in the same way as for the ZIP format, with surely a “compress file” entry offering several sub-entries, for as many formats available.

Towards the end of reciprocating compressors?

Windows, which for a long time seemed to lose interest in this issue, leaving the compression sector to third-party companies, suddenly changed direction last year. We remember that in 2023, Windows suddenly supported the extraction of many formats, including the best known, namely RAR.

With this time an advance in the field of compression, it appears that the firm founded by Bill Gates has decided to take these activities definitively in hand, calling into question the very interest of dedicated software. What to prepare for the death of 7-Zip?

Source : The Verge