Microsoft expands native support for .rar archives to more Windows 11 Insiders users

Coming in the coming months, support for new compression formats is now available to more Insider Program registrants at Windows 11. And it should be a final twist before it rolls out to PCs around the world.

It’s been a few weeks since Microsoft announced this new feature. However, the American giant has yet to prove to us that it is capable of offering something that can replace WinRAR. To mention just one piece of software by pure chance, of course.

Thirty years of waiting almost over

The Insider program provides an overview of upcoming Windows updates. It’s split into three channels, supporting releases ranging from less stable to more stable, and it’s the middle channel, the beta channel, that sees a rather interesting new release coming. Build 22631.2199 gives us a glimpse of the work in progress on the Mountain View side regarding support for rar, tar, 7-Zip, and gz compression formats, to name a few.

The features presented in this build should be quite close to what will be available in version 23H2 of Windows 11 within a few months. If you don’t like them, just install build 22621.2199, which will disable them as long as Microsoft is ok with it.

Whether support for .rar & C formats remains to be seen^ie will convince users a little more than what Windows offers with the .zip format. Otherwise, some software that has been an integral part of our computing landscape for almost thirty years may be stuck around for a while. What will not fail to reassure some:

Source : Windows Central