MS Build 2023: Microsoft is training on the built-in Windows ZIP tool

With the many innovations of Microsoft Build 2023, they are almost gone. Panos Panay, president of Windows Products and Devices, hinted casually with a byline in a Miscellaneous section of Windows Developer that developers are greatly expanding the integrated Windows ZIP utility and supporting significantly more archiving and compression formats.

in which Create a conference blog Banai explains: “We’ve added native support for additional archive formats, including . archive features on compression under Windows.”

Windows ZIP Tool: New Formats

Open source project libarchive supports many formats, which Windows can at least unpack without any additional software. The library can decompress and create .tar, .pax, cpio, .iso (ISO9660), .zip, mtree, .ar, .xar, 7-Zip and WARC formats. libarchive can decompress .lha, .lza, .rar (original format and RAR v5) and .cab formats.

Installing other compression software such as 7-Zip, WinRAR, or similar is not necessary for most Windows users. Only special cases then require specialized software. libarchive also promises more improvements. In addition to zipcrypt, which is considered insecure, the library can also use WinZip AES 128 and 256 encryption, but the old Windows ZIP cannot. she also Thread safe created, except for platforms whose C library does not offer this. Microsoft hasn’t said anything about this yet, but there’s hope that Windows will be able to use more than just one processor for archive processing in the future. That would match the promised better compression performance.

It is not currently clear when extended archive support will be available to everyone. In the blog post, Panay explains that some of the features in it are coming with the new Windows Insider Preview this week. However, the Moments 3 update for Windows 11 may already include the improved Windows ZIP.

(DMK)