Home windows 11 customers will lastly be getting a much-requested characteristic added to the OS — native RAR file extraction help constructed proper into it.

For many years, when you wanted to extract recordsdata compressed utilizing the traditionally well-liked RAR format, you needed to depend on the free-to-use WinRAR software (properly, extra like an infinite 30-day free trial, however nonetheless). Whereas it’s a wonderful program that’s out there in 50 languages and out there for a number of working methods, having native help straight within the OS is extraordinarily handy and means one much less piece of software program cluttering your system.

Microsoft has now introduced that Home windows 11 will lastly help RAR together with a number of different archive codecs. In line with Home windows Chief Product Officer Panos Panay in an official weblog publish, “We’ve added native help for added archive codecs, together with tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and plenty of others utilizing the libarchive open-source undertaking.” 

Nevertheless, the help solely goes midway. Going by the weblog publish, you may solely open RAR recordsdata by the OS however not compress them utilizing the identical format, which implies that you may wish to maintain WinRAR — or among the different greatest file compression software program — put in in your PC till Microsoft will get round to totally supporting the file sort

Incomplete help however there’s untapped potential 

Although the RAR help is incomplete, it’s nonetheless a step in the suitable course for Home windows 11. No different model of Home windows has ever had native help for RAR or another archive format baked into the OS, so supporting so lots of them now could be a reasonably big deal.

The common consumer will normally have to solely extract RAR recordsdata, and that’s every now and then when downloading some random file that occurs to be sealed that manner. Most individuals’s wants are greater than glad utilizing the traditional .zip format as an alternative. 

That mentioned, RAR recordsdata are nonetheless fairly well-liked and ought to be absolutely supported natively — particularly if Microsoft desires Home windows 11 to lastly overtake Home windows 10 because the world’s hottest OS. Hopefully, this announcement implies that Microsoft is already trying into absolutely supporting all these codecs sooner or later, particularly since Home windows 11 is now utilizing the libarchive open-source undertaking to primarily energy this.

For these not acquainted with it, the libarchive is an open-source code library that can be utilized by programmers to create and skim all kinds of file codecs. Microsoft harnessing this undertaking to develop its archive format help has a lot potential — I simply hope the tech large doesn’t squander it.