Microsoft added native support in Windows 11 pro nearly a dozen compressed file formats. A measure announced at the BUILD 2023 developer conference that the company deployed with optional and pre-stage cumulative update KB5031455.

Extended archive support is part of the “Moments 4” package in Windows 11 22H2. To be a optional and optional update, the KB5031455 patch must be installed manually by going to the Windows Update settings page in Windows 11 and checking for recently released updates. It can also be installed from the Microsoft catalog. If all goes well with the “early testers”, the content of the update should eventually reach most Windows users with version 23H2.

More compressed file formats in Windows 11

Compressed files are a type of file that is widely used on the Internet. To understand them in a simple way, they are the ones that group other files inside. Their main goal is to save space by applying different degrees of compression, but they also allow them to improve their distribution in the network of networks and their organization. Handling these files requires specialized applications that allow decompression as well as compression and other advanced features.

However, operating systems can also offer support and you save the use of specialized tools. Windows has supported ZIP formats for quite a few generations, but it wasn’t until this year that it started supporting another important format, RAR. This format offers better compression levels than zip and the use of the default management application for this format, WinRAR, very high compression/decompression speeds and a 128-bit AES encryption tool.

Compatibility is now complete and this way Windows 11 will be able to handle a large number of file types: .zip .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, . tbz2, .tzst, .txz. To say that Microsoft directly (as in other components) used tools to increase system compatibility available open source. , in this case a project libarchive. The project supports other formats such as bzip2, lha, cab, xar or cpio, which could potentially be added to Windows in the future.

Although its potential will not be as complete as that of a dedicated application and, for example, there is no support for password-encrypted files yet, the native integration in Windows 11 is a very useful new feature for file management and can be managed from Windows Explorer.