It’s taken 28 years, but Microsoft has finally added support for RAR files in Windows

Almost 30 years after the arrival of WinRAR, Microsoft has decided to offer native support for the RAR format. Better late than never.

Good things are made to wait, they say. Well, we’ve had to wait a whopping 28 years, but finally Windows 11 will have native support for RAR files. Many of us (if not almost all) have WinRAR installed on our computers, and we are taking advantage of a trial period that never ends.

Well it is true that closing the trial period pop-up takes seconds, but now we’re not even going to have to wait for that just like report from TechCrunch. And it was about time Microsoft included support for this form of compression once and for all.

Goodbye to WinRAR?

Those of us who have combed gray hair remember that the 90s of the 20th century were a competition between compression formatsthat were used to make everything we downloaded from the Internet (at ridiculously slow speeds for the world of fiber optics) of which it seems that only a few were the survivors.

From all that an eternity ago and, an eternity later, Microsoft has decided to go with it. And they are not only going to support RAR, as stated:

We have added native support for additional compression formats such as 7-zip, tar, gz, rar and many others using the libarchive open source project. Now you can get better performance by compressing files in Windows.

some operating systems They have long offered native support for RAR files. (It’s impossible not to think of some Linux distributions), but for Windows to finally be encouraged to offer it is a change that many of us haven’t seen coming. And not only have we not seen it coming, but it is possible that it will end up ruining a program that has accompanied us for a large part of our digital lives.

It’s hard to imagine what does the future hold for WinRAR now that Microsoft has made this change, but since many users are not planning to upgrade to Windows 11 until they have to (something that could be very close), it seems that WinRAR still has some way to go.