Microsoft will improve Windows 11 especially in the area of compression. The operating system will support other formats than the classic Zip.
The information comes from the Build 2023 developer conference. Microsoft is behind several announcements around its flagship OS, Windows 11. If the integration of AI is a major objective, the giant is also working on d other aspects.
In a long article Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows and Peripherals, talks about several things including AI and Windows 11, Dev Home, Copilot improvements or even Bing Chat. We also learn that the OS will be enriched on the side of data compression. Panos Panay indicates
We’ve added native support for additional archive formats including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many more using the open-source libarchive project.
Windows 11 and file compression
This short sentence emphasizes that Windows 11 will be able to natively manage archive formats other than ZIP. This will include RAR, TAR, 7z and gz. This list does not seem exhaustive since without mentioning them explicitly Panos Panay promises that other formats are planned.
This advance will rely on libarchive. It is an open source archiving and compression library. It supports several other formats like lha, cab, xar or cpio archives. However, we do not know if password management will be included. However, this improvement will help make Windows 11 more user-friendly because the installation of software will no longer be necessary.
Currently Windows 11 only supports a few formats including the popular zip. A simple right-click on an archive displays an option to extract its contents to the current directory. It is also possible to make a compression always through a simple right click by choosing
Afficher plus d’options > envoyer vers > dossier compressé
On the other hand we do not know if Microsoft speaks of a management of the compression and the decompression. If this is not the case, you will always have to go through the installation of a third-party application, which will make this progress less interesting.
