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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

WinRAR was and still in fantastic software if you're working on Windows. I know there are CLI tools for macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux but in terms of guaranteed compatibility and being understood by users zip will always be my go-to format. It's like comparing AAC to MP3: the former is superior quality at a smaller size but I have to explain to some people (too many, really) how to play an AAC file while MP3 just works for everyone.

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WinRAR is heavily entrenched in the PC space since the early Warez/DC++/BitTorrent days when storage and internet bandwidth was scarce so media was split in smaller files compressed as tightly as possible, preferably self extracting as well.

So any pirated content you'd download 20+ years ago was almost guaranteed to be RAR archived. Or sometimes even WinACE [1], anyone remember that one? It was awesome as well. Seems like the early 2000's was a war of compression formats similar to VHS vs Betamax decades earlier.

If you go on older established torrent trackers you can still find original torrents/content archived in RAR or ACE formats. Like Disney's Hercules for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinAce

WinAce, what fond memories. Remind me again why it never caught on?

I wish I could tell you but I don't know. I was also a fan of WinACE and found it very easy and pleasant to use to make self extracting archives to put on 1.44 inch floppies to take to school.

BTW, I just tried it out of nostalgia and the OG WinACE app still works on Windows 11 today.

Others were more accessible and good enough

PAR files!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

par files still used in newsgroups.

Those work for any type of files though, not just RAR archives

RAR file format have heavy encryption even on filenames. So 3rd party observers can't see what IS inside of archive actually.

If you encrypt ZIP file - then filenames aren't encrypted, only content.

It's because since RAR is proprietary and didn't have a corporation friendly way to look inside those archives, so they couldn't be scanned.

For users, it was not an issue since they don't have to worry about licensing and whatnot.

WinRAR was also a fun target to write your very own crack for it. You could crack it multiple ways a well: remove the dialog and change texts, patch it to think it's licensed or write a keygen.

RAR had solid archiving, ZIP didn't.

That was HUGE for the emulation scene before 7zip, consider an SNES game:

1. JP version

2. NA version

3. PAL version

And possibly 1 or more revisions of each of the above.

With RAR the size was often not much more than if a single version was compressed. Not so with ZIP

It's my understanding that RAR has some kind of built in data recovery like PAR and I believe had better encryption support early on. IIRC traditional zip encryption was kind of a joke, maybe it was neutered to comply with the export restrictions from the 90s.

Spanning is old as dirt, I remember doing it with pkzip and floppies so I don't think it is something unique to RAR.

Windows Explorer can already open them, kindof makes a third party app useless.

On other hand WinRAR handles running software inside archive much better. So if you only need to run some portable tool one or two time it is pretty handy as there is no need to extract it.

Windows Explorer is worse than 7z or others. Sometimes it doesnt work where other extract the content without problems.

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