While AI may have been the focus of Microsoft’s Build 2023 announcements, not everything the company revealed has to do with AI. The company also detailed a spattering of Windows features, including native support for extra archive formats.
Archive formats, like the .zip you’ve likely already experienced in Windows, are used to turn groups of files into something that’s more portable, so they’re easier to share. Windows has had support for some archive formats, but not it’s getting native support for a bunch more. Per a blog post:
“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.”
This should be good news for anyone who deals with multiple archive formats on a regular basis. It means you won’t need third-party apps just to access the files stored in these archive formats. That said, Microsoft’s native .zip implementation isn’t the best, so hopefully, this change improves archive files across Windows too.
Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t made it clear when the change will go live in Windows, though it sounds like it’s coming soon.
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