Microsoft is adding native support for RAR, 7-Zip and GZ archives to an upcoming Windows 11 release expected this week.

Today Microsoft announced a flurry of news at the Build 2023 conference, including tomorrow’s Windows 11 Moment 3 Update and the new AI-powered Windows co-driver.

In a new blog post, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay outlined these new features and when they will be available to the general public.

As first spotted by The edgehidden in a section discussing a new development feature of Windows 11 called Dev Home, Panay mentioned that Windows 11 will soon have native support for RAR, 7-Zip and gz archives.

“We’ve added native support for additional archive formats including tar, 7-Zip, RAR, gz and many more using the open source libarchive project,” Panay explains in today’s paper. today. blog post.

“You can now get improved performance of the archive feature when compressing on Windows.”

In Windows, ZIP, 7-Zip, and RAR are all popular archive formats, with ZIP being the most widely used of them.

Microsoft introduced support for ZIP archives in Windows in 1998. However, to handle 7-Zip (.7z), RAR (.rar), or gz (.gz) archives, you need to install third-party applications.

Although 7-Zip is free and open-source, and WinRar offers a 40-day trial that never ends, becoming something of a joke in the tech world, native support for these file formats will be very useful for Windows users.

The gz archive format is most commonly used on Linux through the GNU Zip (gzip) utility, as well as TAR archives.

As Windows and Linux have become more tightly integrated, i.e. Windows Subsystem for Linux, support for common Linux archive formats such as gzip and TAR will also be very useful.

Since Microsoft uses open-source libarchive project to add these formats, we’ll probably see native support for other common archive formats like TAR and bzip2 in the future.

Microsoft told The Verge that support for these archive formats will be rolling out to Windows 11 users over the next few days in an “ongoing” update.