Microsoft added support for creating and extracting ZIP archives into its Windows operating system. The Moment 4 update and the Windows 11 version 23H2 update introduced support for extracting additional formats, including RAR, TAR and 7Z.
The archive functionality is certainly a useful feature. Right-click on an archive and select the extract option to decompress it right away. Third-party tools are no longer required.
You may also right-click on files to create ZIP archives out of the selection. It is a handy feature, especially for users who encounter ZIP only occasionally.
Experienced users may have noticed that the implementation is basic. It lacks support for advanced features, especially on the creation side. You can’t create password protected archives, change the compression level or add comments to archives. All of this continues to require dedicated archive apps such as WinRAR, 7-Zip or PeaZip.
A comparison of the time that it takes to extract archives shows, furthermore, that the built-in feature is slower in most cases.
Windows 11: native archive extraction tests
I ran several benchmarking tests to find out if Windows 11’s native archive extraction feature is slower than that of third-party apps.
I ran all extraction jobs 5 times and used the average for the comparison. The first file was an 18.6 gigabyte ZIP archive with 1205 files.
It took Windows 11’s native feature an average of 6.28 minutes to extract the contents of the file on a 2019 idle PC.
WinRAR, which focuses primarily on its own format RAR, extracted the archive on average in 3.51 minutes, which is is more than a third faster.
The open source tool 7-Zip extracted the archive’s content on average in 3.15 minutes, which is almost half the time it took Windows 11’s native implementation to extract the archive.
What about the extraction of RAR archives? I used WinRAR to create a RAR archive out of the extracted ZIP archive and ran the same test again to see how the performance is. The RAR archive had a size of 18.8 GB and the same number of included files.
It took Windows 11’s native RAR extraction feature an average of 5.39 minutes to extract the archive to the system.
WinRAR extracted the same RAR archive in 2.54 minutes on average. 7-Zip was just a few seconds slower, as it took an average of 3.05 minutes to decompress the RAR archive.
Windows 11: compressing ZIP archives comparison
Current stable versions of Windows 11 support the creation of ZIP archives only. This changes in the future.
This time, I picked a a folder with 5307 files and a total size of 2.41 gigabytes . The native ZIP creation feature of Windows 11 created the ZIP archive in 2.29 minutes on average. WinRAR managed to create the archive in 1.28 minutes. 7-Zip flew through the creation of the archive. It took an average of 45 seconds to create it. Both apps have a different native format.
Closing Words
The native integration of support for extracting archive formats and creating some archives is a useful addition to Windows. While that is the case, it is clear that the implementation is not up-to-par with dedicated software.
Users who extract or create archives regularly may want to use third-party solutions for that. It is likely that most of them are faster than the native implementation.
Now You: do you use third-party software to create and extract archives?