how bad are things

Introduced in Build 23H2, the new Windows 11 Explorer feature allows you to work with formats such as RAR, TAR, 7Z and more. Now you have to use various third-party programs for them, such as WinRAR, 7Zip or others.

NeoWin portal tested the speed of the built-in archiver. For this, the author used a dataset with a total volume of 24 gigabytes. It packed them in three different formats: RAR, 7Z, and TAR, with 50 percent compression.

• The first test was conducted on a computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 32 gigabytes of DDR4-3200 RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, and a 500 gigabyte Samsung 980 SSD.
• The experiment was then repeated on a laptop with an Intel Core i3-1125G4 processor, 16 gigabytes of DDR4-3200 and a 500 gigabyte NVMe solid state drive.

Test results with AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Photo: NeoWin

Test results with Intel Core i3-1125G4 / Photo: NeoWin

• As you can see from the results, Explorer in Windows 11 was not inferior to WinRAR and NanaZIP in decompressing TAR archives in both cases (all three programs completed in about 80 seconds).
• However, it turned out to be three times slower when decompressing the RAR archive.
• And it coped with the 7z file 7 times worse. It took almost nine minutes for Windows Explorer to extract the information from the 7z archive, while WinRAR and NanaZIP completed the process in about a minute.

This may not be a problem for people who take the time to work with archives only occasionally. But for those who are constantly dealing with them, this can be a strong argument in favor of competitive solutions. Researchers also noted less convenience and the lack of important functions – for example, the program does not show how much is left until unpacking is complete, since it does not have a suitable status bar).

That’s why File Explorer needs major changes and improvements to replace other programs.