SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the always-at-the-cutting-edge-of-technology dept.
Windows to Finally Support 30 Year Old Archive Format:
It's been 30 years since Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal created the RAR archive format. RAR allows users to compress files so they take up less room on your hard drive. However, you needed a special program like WinRAR to open RAR files on Windows for the better part of three decades.
That's all changing soon. This week Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 11 will finally support RAR files natively. In a long-winded blog post about the future of AI, the company slipped in RAR support in the "In addition..." section. If you were just casually scrolling through, you may have missed it.
"We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows," the blog post states.
Granted, this move may not matter much to people who have never heard of a RAR file. But, those who work with archive formats know the sheer annoyance of not being able to open a somewhat common file format without special software like WinRAR—a file extraction program that people can pay for but generally don't.
See also: 28 years later, Windows finally supports RAR files submitted by owl.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday May 26, @08:40PM (1 child)
still doesn't matter. Soooo glad i got that monkey gone.
Useless OS.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday May 26, @09:22PM
Yes indeed, I deleted my MS-DOS partition in 1997 after not using it for about a year.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].