Native unpacking of RAR and 7z archives in Windows 11 is significantly slower than WinRAR.

The new tool handles TAR well, but struggles with more popular formats.

Microsoft is preparing an update for Windows 11 23H2, which will add the long-awaited feature: native support for RAR and 7z archives. Users will no longer need third-party applications to unpack such archives. The public update will be available in the fall, but the unpacking feature can be tested in beta right now. This is what the editors of the Neowin portal did, comparing the unpacking speed through "File Explorer," WinRAR, and NanaZIP.

For testing, files totaling 24 GB were archived in RAR, 7z, and TAR, after which all three programs were used on two different builds: a desktop PC with Ryzen 5 @ 4 GHz and 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and a laptop with Core i3 @ 2 GHz and 16 GB of the same memory.

Here are the results for the more powerful Ryzen build:

And here are the results for the laptop with Core i3:

In both cases, "File Explorer" significantly lags behind specialized programs in unpacking RAR and 7z, offering comparable results only with TAR archives. The performance is worst with 7z: where other programs manage in one to one and a half minutes, "File Explorer" takes over eight minutes.

In addition to the longer unpacking time, the authors noted several other drawbacks. For instance, "File Explorer" lacks a proper display of the decryption progress, so the remaining time must be guessed. It also cannot open password-protected archives and still only supports packing in ZIP format.