Windows 11 continues to accumulate interesting updates with today a historic novelty made accessible to its users.
The operating system developed by Microsoft has been able for nearly 25 years to support archive formats, such as the famous “.rar”. But until then, and despite the passage of years, you still had to use third-party software (hello WinRAR) to decompress most of the archives and access the files present there. This will no longer be the case today, except for one major exception.
11 new archive formats added
Windows 11 22H2 version should be nothing but happiness for those who love Windows. Because it is a historic change which has just been announced by the Redmond giant. Indeed, if you have this version on your computer, you will now be able to decompress many archive formats. More precisely, 11 in total:
- .rar
- .7z
- .tar
- .tar.gz
- .tar.bz2
- .tar.zst
- .tar.xz
- .tgz
- .tbz2
- .tzst
- .txz
An improvement which follows an announcement made last May by the man behind Windows 11 Panos Panay. “ We’ve added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-Zip, RAR, gz, and many others, using the open-source libarchive project » he explained then.
One exception, password-protected files
This is very good news, which unfortunately must be tempered by the fact that password-protected archives cannot be unzipped directly by Windows 11, even after downloading the update. Bleeping Computer wanted to know more by asking a Microsoft spokesperson, but no comment was given on the reasons for this choice.
For those who wish to benefit from the new feature, you will need to open Settings and go to the Windows Updates page. On this, it is the (optional) update KB5031455 which must be selected. It is currently only at the preview stage, and will be deployed more widely during Patch Tuesday in November.
Source : Bleepingcomputer
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