By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.
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Pour one out for WinRAR because Microsoft just announced Windows 11 will natively support RAR and a bunch of other archive formats that Windows users have been waiting decades for. Perfect if ye be swimmin’ in lots o’ files, if ye catch me drift.
“We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project,” says Windows chief Panos Panay in a blog post today. “You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.”
Microsoft tells us support for the new formats should roll out in a new work-in-progress build later this week. In a Build session this week Microsoft confirmed that an update to Windows 11 will ship to everyone in September to support opening these additional archive formats. “We also plan to provide support for creating those files in those formats in 2024,” says Sharla Soennichsen, a product manager at Microsoft.
Either way, the addition of tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and others is great for Windows 11 users. You’ll no longer have to install third-party apps to access these files. Hopefully, the integration is a little better than the native ZIP support, though.
Update May 23rd, 4:14PM ET: Added response from Microsoft about when the testing will start.
Update, May 26th 7:15AM ET: Added release date details from a Microsoft Build session.
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