Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 27 (Xinhua)-- Microsoft will release a major feature update for Windows 11 later this year under the version number 23H2, most notably the redesign of File Explorer. The new version of File Explorer will support a variety of compressed file formats such as RAR, TAR, 7Z, and so on, which is good news for users who do not want to install third-party applications. But can the new version of File Explorer replace professional compression software such as WinRAR and NanaZIP?

Compressed file is a technology that can package multiple files or folders into a smaller file, which can save space and bandwidth, and facilitate transfer and storage. At present, there are many different compressed file formats on the market, such as ZIP, RAR, 7Z and so on, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Prior to Windows 11 23H2, ZIP was the only compressed file format natively supported by the system. This means that users must install third-party applications such as WinRAR, 7Zip, NanaZIP, etc., if they want to open or create compressed files in other formats. Although these apps are excellent and have free or trial versions, installing third-party apps may be cumbersome or redundant for users who do not often compress files or just want to unzip a randomly downloaded compressed file.

Therefore, Microsoft decided to let File Explorer support RAR, TAR, 7Z and other compressed file formats. In this way, users can open or extract compressed files in these formats directly in the system without installing any additional applications. This is a great convenience and advantage for ordinary users.

Neowin tested the new version of File Explorer with WinRAR (probably one of the most popular compression software) and NanaZIP (a 7Zip branch optimized for Windows 11). The test file was a free Windows 11 virtual machine file from Microsoft 24GB and packaged it into three formats that were not previously supported by the system: RAR, 7Z, and TAR with a compression ratio of 50%. Then, use the new version of File Explorer, WinRAR, and NanaZIP to extract these compressed files and measure the time they take. Neowin conducted three tests on desktops (configured with Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB DDR4-3200, NVIDIA RTX 4060 and Samsung 980 SSD 500GB) and laptops (configured with Intel Core i3-1125G4, 16GB DDR4-3200 and 500GB NVMe SSD) to get average results.

The test results show that File Explorer does not encounter any problems when extracting TAR files, and its performance is consistent with that of WinRAR and NanaZIP, completing the task in about 80 seconds. The RAR file got file explorer into trouble, causing it to take nearly six minutes to unzip, more than three times slower than WinRAR and more than twice as slow as NanaZIP. 7Z files perform even worse: file Explorer took nearly nine minutes to extract, while WinRAR and NanaZIP only took about a minute.

CTOnews.com noted that tests on Intel-based laptops yielded almost the same results, proving that third-party applications were much faster at extracting files than the upgraded file explorer.

This may not be a problem for users who rarely need to extract RAR or other previously unsupported file formats. However, for users who often use compressed files, they are unlikely to give up applications such as WinRAR, NanaZIP, 7Zip, and so on.

And, not only because of performance disadvantages, file resource managers are also greatly reduced in terms of convenience. For example, it does not display an appropriate status menu (does not show how much time is left to unzip), cannot open password-protected compressed files, and ZIP is still the only supported format when you need to package a pile of files into a single compressed file (not to mention other features such as splitting files, adjusting compression ratios, and so on).

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