Embrace... now what were the next couple of steps?

To be honest, Windows could claim to support WMF and I'd still rather open them in an entirely different program that whatever MS wants me to open them in.

Hell, Chrome still keeps trying to open my PDFs and I have to tell it to beggar off on a regular basis!

Like Internet Explorer, Windows' built-in zip support was handy for installing the decompressors.

Rather confused as to why a rag such as this would lump it in with WinRAR

"The apps often demand acquisition of a paid license after a few days' use. Also, criminals noticed the constant demand for decompressors, making them a target for ridealong adware and malware. Many a download site also tried to confuse those who sought decompression tools with dark patterns, luring users to unintended downloads.

But if you managed to find a legitimate download that didn't infect your computer, enslave you to the criminal underworld or harass you with advertising, the ads mostly worked just fine.

All of that will soon, hopefully, be behind us."

This seems unfair. 7-Zip is free and open source, available at 7-zip.org. No malware, no ads, and the first thing that pops up when doing a Google search (yes. also in Incognito mode, so not an artifact of my search history).

WinRAR OTOH is of course trialware, and should have been dead years ago. I have no idea why anyone would ever recommend it.

WinRAR has meme status. Removing the nag screen has been Lesson #1 on reverse engineering courses for many moons now.

RAR was best for integrity and spanning disks across large sets. ZIP could do it (hell, I even know the PKZIP command-line syntax even today), but RAR allowed you to add some more "integrity" to the files so they were more likely to survive corruption.

RAR should have been dead since the days of the floppy, though, it's only used as some kind of "hacker" cachet label, to show you were around in the heyday of "Software Name (cracked).r57" and hoping and praying you could get the complete set off Usenet before it disappeared.

RAR serves no useful purpose nowadays.

Even PAR (which is designed to have a configurable amount of redundancy to avoid data corruption) is pretty niche and obsolete nowadays. Data storage corruption is far less of an issue than it ever was now.

7z has better compressions, but nothing that ZIP couldn't add with a "ZIP v4" or whatever we're up to now (PK/WinZIP extended ZIP with AES encryption, etc. over the years). To be honest, compression is far less an issue now than it ever was. Short of disk space? Buy another few Tb. Far beyond the old releases where people would down-sample in-game FMV just to try to shrink it into a sensible number of RAR files, etc. and used RAR rather than ZIP (before 7z existed) to get a few more bytes on the disk.

I used IZArc for years until it went ad-ware, and I'm now on Peazip. Because I want one tool that handles compressed files, and only one. RAR and WinZip are dead, and even 7z.exe is only on my computer as a command-line version to plug into Peazip (I think).

They seem to be largely used as container files these days anyway. If you look at a releases page on Github, the zipped files are more or less the same size as their unzipped contents. It makes sense, especially for projects with daily versions, the time to compress the file would probably be more than the extra time needed to upload it uncompressed. I think 7-zip defaults to Fastest anyway.

that the ability to ask what the time is in Cyprus, or the ability to book flights and hotels there, is properly a function of an operating system, whose job is surely to allocate processor resources to applications as required?

As a test, I just asked a search engine what time it was in Cypress, and sure enough, it offered dozens of possibilities.

You don't suppose this could be (whisper it) an MS-sponsored retail opportunity?

Yes.

"Just like you would with Bing Chat..."

i.e., you just wouldn't.

I never open rar files, if someone sends them to me, I ask them to send in another format. I hadn't seen them in ages, but the missus got a bunch from her manager, she also asked for them in zip or something besides rar.

Copilot, Dev Drive and Dev Home sounds like Clippy 3: The Bloatening to me.

Of course, we'll need a shiny new (preferably Surface) PC to run this on, won't we? And a OneDrive subscription? Oh, and an Azure subscription, don't forget that. And it'll be near impossible to turn it off, if they can find a way to make that happen.

We'll be stuck moaning about it for years until they finally decide to loosen their claws. It's like Internet Explorer all over again, isn't it?

I just wish people could choose a format and stick to it. At my organisation there's no official policy or mandated format (or if there is, nobody complies) so everyone just uses whatever they like and you have to be prepared for everything. On my corporate machine I have third-party WinZip, the regular Windows zipping function, WinRAR, 7-Zip... these can open tarballs as well because I get some of those from time to time.

However, a particularly bad example I did see was an accountancy firm my mother was dealing with. She phones me up one day and says "They've sent me this strange file with my documents in and I can't open it" - after talking her through how to reveal the file extension, turns out it was 7-Zip. They hadn't told her that's what it was and it took a moment of digging to figure it out. She'd never heard of that and, obviously, didn't have it on her quite basic Windows machine. She had to forward it to me so I could repackage it as a regular Zip.

Annoying. That has to have caught out other clients before.

I'll definitely not hear a bad word said about 7 Zip. WinZip did stuff that Windows built in zip handling didn't but it's otherwise pretty terrible. I know there are command line utilities for tar and gz files but I can never remember the incantations to use them.

Phil Katz died in 2000. If he hadn't published the Zip file format we might be using something else now. I wonder what he'd be doing now if he was still around.

"I can see the files in that attachment you sent me but I can't open them"

That'll be because the zip file is password protected and MS's file mangler is too stupid to tell you that you need to open the attachment in WinZip or similar

Well, it stands to reason that Microsoft had to open up a new massive security hole after it finally stopped supporting macros in its software (you know, after some decades).

Why would you upgrade and patch otherwise, right?