Cancel your WinRAR trial: Windows will soon support RAR, gz, 7z, and other archives
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I feel i should go ahead an finally buy that WinRAR license, just to support those 20+ years of mooching.
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To be honest, the one feature I always found in WinRAR that distinguished it from every other archiver and format is its ability to create integrated recovery data, similar to PAR2 files, but without the hassle of having to do the archiving, then do the PAR2 calculations as well.
Sometimes, for archival of data in compressed files, it's rather handy. But it's the only distinguishing feature for WinRAR these days. If 7Zip added this feature, I think I'd completely forget about WinRAR.
Sometimes, for archival of data in compressed files, it's rather handy. But it's the only distinguishing feature for WinRAR these days. If 7Zip added this feature, I think I'd completely forget about WinRAR.
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Fun Fact: ZipFolders was developed by a Microsoft employee as a personal side-project, which Microsoft then bought when they wanted to build that functionality into Windows itself. It almost got him fired though.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQUtUQ_L8Yk
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQUtUQ_L8Yk
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Dark Pumpkin
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I hope there will be drastic speed improvements from this change. The built in support for zip files is agonizingly slow for anything more than a few MB. Zip files that take 7zip a couple of seconds to unpack could take upwards of a full minute using the built in zip support.
Any time I accidentally use the built in zip support or don't have the option of installing something better, the slowness makes it feel like I've been transported 15 years back in time.
Any time I accidentally use the built in zip support or don't have the option of installing something better, the slowness makes it feel like I've been transported 15 years back in time.
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Artem S. Tashkinov
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I'm hoping the opposite. Namely, nobody will bother creating new RAR files any more, because one of the major use cases for installing WinRAR is now gone. And if you never install WinRAR because Windows decompresses RARs for you, you can't pollute the Internet with new RAR files!
What a useless format. 7zip, gzip, etc are infinitely superior for a variety of reasons.
I might still stick with 7-Zip because it has a very useful feature: select a bunch of files in Explorer, and the context menu allows you to decompress them into their own folders. Interested to see how MS implements this.
RAR is the only popular compression format which offers recovery record out of the box which allows to restore data in transmit or when e.g. extracting old back ups. How is it "useless" is beyond me. I guess if it's not "free" it's automatically useless. Or maybe because it was created by a Russian programmer. Oh, wait, Igor Pavlov, the 7-zip creator, is also Russian.
And don't tell me about PAR2. It's a crutch most people will never use.
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Article Nitpick:
Actually, it first appeared in the "Plus! 98" pack for Windows 98.
en.wikipedia.org
Actually, it first appeared in the "Plus! 98" pack for Windows 98.
Microsoft Plus! - Wikipedia
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Compression scheme are somewhat different. Newer ones tend to be much better then older ones. RAR, when it came out, was better then anything else out there and was really helpful when it came to backing things up. Nowadays it's pretty much yet another formatNobody likes WinRAR not because it is paid software, but because it is the personification of this XKCD.
But to make matters worse, it's a proprietary standard. The worst kind.
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It kind of depends on the .arc file.
PKZip was originally PKARC. (PK stands for Phil Katz, it's author.) Phil was sued back in the 80's by a company claiming that it owned the rights to .arc (even though the formats were incompatible.) He was quite the free or shareware enthusiast and was pretty pissed about the whole thing.
So he simply changed the file extension to .zip and the program name to PKZip. That is why, years ago, when you downloaded a copy of PKZip it always included a license statement dedicating .zip to the public domain.
So, if that .arc file was created by PKArc, then you're in luck. If it's an old SEAs archive file, well I've no idea whatever happened to them.
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This definitely makes a lot of sense to add as a built in OS feature. There could still be room for 3rd party compression utilities but most people will probably just use one of the free formats built into windows. I've used zip and rar in the past and currently use 7zip. I've also used a variety of different compression formats in unix. I have yet to really come across a standout feature offered by 1 but not the others other than slightly better or worse compression ratios, but not enough to matter.
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I think the basic issue here is that certain types of software don't work well as a proprietary paid software (at least in the modern tech landscape), and WinRAR belongs to that category. WinRAR isn't just the software, it also encompasses the RAR file format, which is proprietary.
For one, you cannot create RAR files unless you use proprietary software like WinRAR. You can only unpack RAR files for free (either using WinRAR trial or say the new built-in Windows support). It means you are encouraged to spread RAR files around but making it hard for others to create the same types of files. It's similar to Adobe's tactics with PDFs until they relented and made PDF an open format. In general, proprietary formats have a lot of baggages and tend to lead to long term issues down the line. If they had made RAR an open format though, my suspicion is that WinRAR would quickly lose its customers because while it's debatable whether WinRAR was a better program than its competition like 7-zip, it's certainly true that most people wouldn't see enough value to pay for it if 7-zip just works with RAR's natively (and that's if they used RAR instead of other formats to begin with).
This is kind of why people dislike the software. To buy WinRAR is to engage into this type of ecosystem. It's fine for you to buy it, but I would personally much rather stick with open formats that are much more interchangeable with a larger variety of software support.
I think another reason why paying for WinRAR is made fun of is simply that most people don't actually need it and might have bought it because they didn't know better. They could have just used 7-zip to unpack the file, which would have worked just fine. It's just that the first option they see "how to RAR file" is to download WinRAR and then they see a giant payment dialog box.
I don't have a philosophical bent that all proprietary software are bad. I just don't think proprietary compression format / software really works in this market (unless you are making very specialized types of compression schemes, not a generic one).
Note: I also need to point out that WinRAR is so gentle about reminding people to pay because if they had a hard paywall, I think no one would use RAR at all. It's not the only format around.
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I'll withhold final judgement until I see it in action, but at this point I'm grateful for a Windows feature announcement that doesn't immediately make me hope there's a way to turn it off.
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Artem S. Tashkinov
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Eugene Roshal provides sources for RAR unarchiver. RAR has native decompressors for pretty much all popular operating systems including Android.
Speaking of the EULA, no, there's no "license":
You may not use, copy, emulate, clone, rent, lease, sell, modify, decompile, disassemble, otherwise reverse engineer, or transfer the licensed software, or any subset of the licensed software, except as provided for in this agreement. Any such unauthorized use shall result in immediate and automatic termination of this license and may result in criminal and/or civil prosecution.
If you buy WinRAR you're bound by its license and you cannot reverse engineer it. However no one stops you from reverse engineering it outside the license agreement.
Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission.
Whoa, so, given a written permission from WinRAR Inc. you can probably actually reverse engineer it. Again, that's all within this license.
Lastly, there's such a thing called clean room design. That's how RAR 2.0/3.0 algorithms were reverse engineered.
Lastly, I know it'll probably be deemed whataboutism but how do you continue to use Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS - all of which are proprietary operating systems (Android has an open source kernel but tons of libraries and components are proprietary) which also don't allow to reverse engineer them (except for providing compatibility). What about the firmware for your CPU/GPU/NIC/SSD/Sound card? All proprietary. RE is not allowed as well.
At least you could be a little bit more consistent and start using devices without (closed) firmware running fully open operating systems. Don't remember if there are any left.
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Why not tell you about PAR2 if you are telling me about a feature of RAR that most people will also never use? I would hardly call a scheme that is file format agnostic a "crutch". RAR and PAR2 use the exact same Reed-Solomon code for error detection and correction, so I don't see how RAR is superior to basically any other archival format since you can pair PAR2 with anything else, and get the same level of error correction as RAR, but without the onerous licensing.
It's not only not free as in beer, it doesn't allow reverse engineering either, so it's not really possible to make a legal free alternative. Which would be fine if it provided something above other compression schemes. Which it does not. It's a paid product which you cannot implement yourself that is functionally identical to free compression algorithms, so yes, it is functionally useless. It's not faster to compress, it's not faster to decompress, it's not more efficient, it's not less computationally or memory intensive to decompress or compress. It doesn't allow larger maximum files sizes than alternatives. What benefit does it provide to something that is free? Why should I use it?
Like I said, I don't have a problem paying for good software. RAR doesn't provide me anything that any number of other free formats provide, so it's not worth it.
WTF does that have to do with anything other than an unfounded accusation of racism? Obviously nothing, since as you note, 7-zip was also created by a Russian.
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Back in the day when I used WinRAR it's because I was generally downloading stuff (often, but not always pirated content) over dial-up and the ability of download sites to use rar files to split an archive into multiple parts was handy in those cases where I was trying to download something that would take multiple hours minimum over a slow and flaky connection. These days of much faster, always on internet connections, web browsers that have built in download management, etc I've very rarely encountered a rar in the wild. It's almost always zips or 7zs.I'm hoping the opposite. Namely, nobody will bother creating new RAR files any more, because one of the major use cases for installing WinRAR is now gone. And if you never install WinRAR because Windows decompresses RARs for you, you can't pollute the Internet with new RAR files!
What a useless format. 7zip, gzip, etc are infinitely superior for a variety of reasons.
I might still stick with 7-Zip because it has a very useful feature: select a bunch of files in Explorer, and the context menu allows you to decompress them into their own folders. Interested to see how MS implements this.
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I think about this every time people complain about ads or surveillance capitalism, DRM, or huge companies like Microsoft giving things away as loss leaders and crowding out small players. It’s not wrong to recognize the downsides but … we got here because a lot of affluent people don’t want to buy software. My big surprise is that WinRAR is still solvent because it’s hard to pay developers with an app which many people don’t think of as a core tool.
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You're misinformed. PKARC was in fact compatible with SEA's .arc file format, and in the lawsuit it was shown that PKARC was just modified SEA code (with even the exact same comments, down to spelling errors).
ARC (file format) - Wikipedia
PKZIP was an entirely different and new program that used a new compression format developed for it, ZIP.
There's several Youtube videos covering the story:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sV-3-vPx3I
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu7sY1LOWiI
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No thanks, I'll stick with 7zip. Have used or needed anything else in years and pretty much supports everything already and is fast and efficient and very configurable with no issues on windows or linux.
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I bought a copy of WinRAR ages ago, and it has one killer feature that makes me stick with it: built-in recovery records. (WinRAR uses Reed-Solomon encoding.) That makes it perfect for keeping archival copies of things that would be impossible or onerous to recreate. For example, I have a RAR archive of nearly every album I own, and it should be resilient to bit rot. While modern file systems are much better about data integrity and resiliency, they're not so ubiquitous as to obviate the need for recovery records, in my opinion.
The recovery record also pairs well with AES 256 encryption, since bit rot can render encrypted files unintelligible.
So although it is possible to do recovery records with other tools, WinRAR makes it so convenient that it's my first choice. I even verified recovery works once by making changes to an archive in a hex editor.
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I've been a paid user of IrfanView since 1999 and have purchased it multiple times since because the value is that good, especially with the batch processing functionality. I imagine those little bursts of money to support software developers, that otherwise essentially work for free, enable them to continue developing excellent software.
It's not that hard to show a little appreciation for these folks.
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Ok, but why would you use RAR, with so much potential legal landmines, while equally as good alternatives exist? The point of something like open-source software is I don't need a written permission from a random company (what if WinRAR just says "no, we don't like you", do you just say "ok" and stop making your version of MyRAR?). And open formats do not require clean room reverse engineering to begin with, and have clear and reference implementations that just let you use them without all these issues. (Edit: Also, as far as I know no open-source software is capable of fully replicating creating a RAR)
Regarding Windows/macOS/etc, those are operating systems, not interchangeable formats. Even when using such proprietary software and OSes, you can still use open formats to communicate with each other. The issue with your argument isn't whatboutism, but that you are arguing proprietary versus open software, but the issue here is one of open formats. (Yes the EULA is about WinRAR, but the core issue is that reverse engineering WinRAR is just there to make it possible to create RAR files)
Regarding this last point (other than the part where you are comparing software vs formats), it's easy: it's about available choices. RAR isn't really necessarily better than other formats, but it's proprietary. Why would I use it while I could use other open formats? It's not like it's providing anything particular must-haves. With say Android/iOS, it's not like we have alternatives.
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I'm talking about the compressor, not the decompressor. You even quoted the part of the license agreement that I am referring to:
If you want to compress RAR, Roshal will give you a license to do that, but you cannot reverse engineer it to create your own implementation. He will even provide you the source code for the compressor if you are a licensee, but again, you cannot write your own implementation if you wanted to say, improve upon it, without his express permission.
libarchive wrote their decompression implementation by doing a clean room design from the format notes. But again, that is decompression-only.
Read what I've been consistently saying this whole time. I have no issue with a closed, paid products if it provides something free alternatives do not. All your examples of closed software provide features that other competitors, paid and free alike, do not. RAR provides absolutely nothing you cannot get that is equal or better for free elsewhere.
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I made a comment below, but PKware was a one-man show. It pretty much died when Phil Katz died in the early 90's. Zip lived on mainly because Phil was a free software enthusiast and had placed .zip into the public domain.
I can't say I knew him, but I did exchange a couple of BBS based Relay-Mail messages with him back then. Those in the BBS community were pretty shocked when we heard of his passing.
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Downvoted comment, but my experience has been that zip "folders" confuse users. They look like folders but don't behave in the same way.
Let's say I send someone a zip file full of pictures, they browse to it in explorer, and then open one of the files. It's actually being extracted to a temp folder, so you won't be able to save any changes back into the original location. The location isn't a real folder, but the user doesn't necessarily understand that.
The file can only open in the default viewer and there's a massively reduced set of context menu options.
Now let's say you want to open the contents of a zip "folder" using the 'Open' dialog of a program like Word. Well, you can't, because the 'Open' dialog is configured only to look for a particular type of file (e.g. *.docx).
If you're going to create a simplifying metaphor for the end user, I think it's bad practice to make it work at only a superficial level.
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Luke: I" think my uncle knows him. He said he was dead"
Obi-Wan: "Oh, he's not dead... Not yet."
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This is the thing with RAR. Back in the day, it made sense because it actually did things other formats did not do. Now, it's redundant Internet pollution, and the only reason to even have a RAR decompressor is to deal with files that were created 20 years ago. Nobody should be creating new RAR files today. There are far better formats and software, and the use cases where RAR actually provided a benefit are long gone and obsolete. If you are still using RAR, you might as well still be using SIT and AIFF. And yes, you can still download Stuffit Expander from the developer, but unlike WinRAR, they had the sense to make it free.
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Does anyone actually use rar files in day-to-day? All I've ever seen it used for is warez/pirated stuff.
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OK, now do support for file systems other than FAT32, VFAT and NTFS. Windows users might like to be able to read/write files on their Linux partitions, the way Linux users can read/write on Windows partitions. Start with ext4. You'd be hard pressed to find a file system that Linux doesn't support. I can even read old OS/2 disks with JFS and HPFS.
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RAR was developed back in 90-s. It has a lot of advantages over ZIP:
1. It compresses all the files together ("solid mode"), while ZIP compresses them individually, so each file adds overhead. This adds up when you have a ton of small files.
2. RAR uses better compression algorithms, which was important back in the dial-up era.
3. RAR is a more robust format, it can use error-correcting codes to fix small damage.
4. It supports splitting archives into multiple volumes, so you could fit them onto individual floppy disks. Yes, this was a great feature back then.
5. It actually fully supports NTFS alternate streams, Windows ACLs, and other exotic features.
And keep in mind, RAR was first developed in 1993, only 4 years after ZIP.
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This news coming right after the one where it said that MS scans in your zip archive stored in their Cloud make me think this is a strategic move on their part.
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Finally. Hope they support splitting RAR archives on multiple floppy disks.
/s
But seriously, why would anybody still be using RAR instead of 7zip in 2023?
/s
But seriously, why would anybody still be using RAR instead of 7zip in 2023?
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