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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

> WinRAR, a utility for compressing files, and has an installed base of about 500 million.

Yeah, right.

Edit: this figure is possibly taken from the WinRAR website [1]. It is more likely that there have been that many cumulative downloads, and even that seems to be a high number. Given that Windows has .zip file support built-in for quite some time, and the fact that nearly nobody downloads .zip files anymore, makes me very suspicious of this kind of statistic.

[1] https://www.win-rar.com/

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I don't doubt the numbers.

Until very recently Windows could not natively unarchive .rar files and you needed to download WinRAR to be able to do this. I still find it not terribly uncommon to run into a random .rar file that previously would have meant I needed to install it, even if I only used it once.

> and the fact that nearly nobody downloads .zip files anymore

Citation needed? Why would people not be downloading .zip files anymore?

What I don't get is why people kept installing WinRAR when 7zip can do all the same things and doesn't beg for money.

WinRAR in my experience has a better speed/compression ratio than 7Zip. If you need best compression 7z is probably best but it will cost you some extra time. The GUI and integration of 7Zip also aren't as polished as WinRAR's. I've been using both since their early versions and each have their individual strengths.

Subjective: WinRAR has nicer UI.

Objective: 7z (the format) doesn't have the same data recovery options as RAR. As it stands, RAR remains one of the best options for long-term archival of data for casual users thanks to its optional recovery records.

Sure, but if you are a non technical user what are you likely going to search for first.

A lot of non technical people know "winrar" and even if they don't if you search "rar file" on Google the first result is winrar.

7zip can't do all the same things. It's an incomplete WinRar clone that leaves out a lot of features and adds very little on its own, besides the 7zip format and being open source (both neat things, but that doesn't replace the long list of features it doesn't have or the worse UI)

> What I don't get is why people kept installing WinRAR

Kids those days. There are some rar archives ( with recovery record ? ) that are only readable by winrar.

You can't get a citation for this, and I must admit that this was a bit of a hyperbole.

Still, I sincerely believe that in a typical year, a typical user runs into zero or one .zip files. Of course there are exceptions, but these power users do not make up a large part of the population. Facebook and Instagram are not shipped in .zip format for a reason.

Here are some numbers to think about:

According to Microsoft, there are ~1.4 billion devices that run Windows 10 or Windows 11 [1]. Apparently, there are some 200 million additional devices that run older versions of Windows [2].

Now, I could hypothetically ask my mom and dad, and find out that only one of them knows what a .zip file is. The other has not heard of .rar. I don't think I myself am a typical user, but I do know .rar, and I do not even have WinRAR installed.

That leaves me to conclude that it is very, very, unlikely that 31% of all Windows users has WinRAR installed.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/06/24/stay-...

[2] https://jitendra.co/how-many-windows-users-are-there-in-the-...

I know many people that still use it because it does all formats, it’s what they’ve been using forever, and the UI is so much better than using zip on Windows.

Of course, RAR usage nowadays is probably a bit more limited to things like usenet downloads, so the people caring enough to install an alternative decompressor is narrowing.

Don't all email providers automatically zip attachments after a certain number and don't all the major OSes try to hide extensions and include zip handling? I'm not sure what your parents knowing about zip files indicates about its usage.

i have not seen anything relevant packaged in rar for at since the early 2000s

I haven't downloaded it in 10 years or more, but I know I've downloaded it (and WinZip) a few dozen times. Back in the day I even had a paid license.

I do reject the idea that "nearly nobody downloads .zip files anymore". It's still pretty common. Crafters using Cricuts and engravers regularly download zip files of fonts, etc. Fedex/UPS package up invoices of a certain size, or consolidated billing accounts, in zip files. Etc.

Every game mod for every game ever.

WinRAR is still very popular in my experience. I don't know why, but it definitely is. People still send me .rar files.

WinRAR's strong point is support for RAR archives, not ZIP which has been natively supported in Windows for years (since XP?).

I think Windows 11 got native RAR and 7Z support recently but I'm not sure what libraries it uses for this.

Sort of, the "zip folder" thing was introduced with the "98 Plus!" pack, but came natively with XP. That said, "natively supported in Windows" is one thing, but the usability was... well, not great. The entire "it's a compressed folder!" analogy seems reasonable, but the implementation wasn't. It ate memory like few other components, crashed often, and because it was treated like a folder only in file explorer the analogy quickly broke down when using a file picker anywhere else. WinZIP and WinRAR were basically requirements if you often worked with zip archives until 7zip came along and did everything just a tad better.

Windows 11 uses libarchive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libarchive#Users

"nearly nobody downloads .zip files anymore"

At this point you lost my attention.

While I know that WinRAR has some die-hard user bases, I have never been sure who their paying user base is. Are there some companies that are completely dependent on WinRAR for some internal processes?

I'm one of their paying user base. To me WinRAR is like the VLC of archives. I can throw almost anything at it and it will work. Other compression tools, not so much. I'm also a fan of giving money to small, independent developers.

I remember RAR being popular in the early 00's but when 7-zip started becoming a thing I switched to that, and then I rarely saw .RAR's.

RAR seemed to handle large collections of files better on Windows than .zip back in the day, and it had a few features that .zip didn't, so it was something I typically installed on like Windows XP and such back then. But I'm not sure why anyone would use it over 7-zip today unless you have massive numbers of old .RAR files laying around.

I did work for a company that actually licensed WinZip because it was easier to use than the default Windows interface for .zip files.

> But I'm not sure why anyone would use it over 7-zip today unless you have massive numbers of old .RAR files laying around.

Even then, 7-zip supports extracting rar.

> But I'm not sure why anyone would use it over 7-zip today

7zip UI is ... a bit special. It is not shitty like Windows {10,11}, but it needs some emotional attention.

> Are there some companies that are completely dependent on WinRAR for some internal processes?

In aa world where 7zip exists, most likely not.

> Given that Windows has .zip file support built-in for quite some time, and the fact that nearly nobody downloads .zip files anymore, makes me very suspicious of this kind of statistic.

Windows has _some_ .zip file support. Winrar is usually used for rar files. Zip files are still used (docx xlsx and pptx are zip files).

winrar has been around since I was in high school...21+ years 500 million downloads isn't unreasonable during that time frame real question is: how many windows boxes are up right now and how many have winrar installed

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