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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

7-zip is the de-facto tool on Windows and has been for a long time. It's more than fast and compressed enough for 99% of peoples use cases.

It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

The more likely thing to eat into its relevance is now that Windows has built-in basic support for zipping/unzipping EDIT: other formats*, which relegates 7-zip to more niche uses.

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7-zip is the de-facto tool on Windows and has been for a long time.

Agreed. The only thing I think it has been missing is PAR support. I think they should consider incorporating one of the par2cmdline forks and porting that code to Windows as well so that it has recovery options similar to WinRAR. It's not used by everyone but that should deprecate any use cases for WinRAR in my opinion.

Windows has had built in zip/unzip since vista. 7zip is far superior (and the install base proves that)

As mentioned in another comment, zip support actually goes further back as far as '98, but only Windows 11 added support for handling other formats like RAR/7-Zip/.tar/.tar.gz/.tar.bz2/etc.

That allows it to be a default that 'just works' for most people without installing anything extra.

The vast majority of users don't care about the extra performance or functionality of a tool like 7-zip. They just need a way to open and send files and the Windows built-in tool is 'good enough' for them.

I agree that 7-zip is better, but most users simply do not care.

Windows zip is not in fact good enough. I've run into weird, buggy behavior, hanging on extract, all sorts of nonsense. I can see the argument that a universally-adopted solution is better, but that's different from windows just not working.

I'm not saying I would ever use it. I'm saying that for casual non-power users, it's good enough. They work with it and if it breaks once in a blue moon they don't care. They just want it to open the files they get and give them a way to send files compressed.

That is enough to bite into 7-Zip's share of users.

Windows unzip is so ungodly slow and terrible! Long live 7zip!

Windows now has 7z support. I fear 7-zip will continue to lose relevancy for consumers of .7z files.

7-zip, through its .7z format, also supports AES encryption. I'd argue it's probably the easiest way to encrypt individual file archives that you need to access on both Windows and Linux. I have a script I periodically run that makes an encrypted .7z archive of all of my projects, which I then upload for off-site backup. (On-site, I don't bother encrypting.)

Is there something different about the built in zip context menu functionality now than before? I'm pretty sure you could convert something to a zip file since forever ago by right clicking any file.

It could support basic ZIP files, but only Windows 11 added support for 7-Zip (.7z), RAR (.rar), TAR, and TAR variants (like .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, etc).

That makes it 'good enough' for the vast majority of people, even if it's not as fast or fully-featured as 7-Zip.

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