Windows 11 finally got a new feature that should have been available for years. There’s only one problem

Microsoft has released a new update for Windows 11, which brings small but very important changes. The company has finally released support for a number of new file compression formats.

Windows 11 will finally unpack compressed files itself. There is one “but”

Microsoft announced new products, and now they have finally started to reach users’ computers. As he noted, as promised, the company has made support for new file packaging formats available in Windows 11. Rar, 7z, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.zst, tar.xz, tgz, tbz2, tzst, and txz archives have now been added to the previously very limited pool. More may also be made available in the future – e.g. LZH, LZH and XAR.

This means that at least some users will be able to refrain from installing additional programs for compressing and extracting archives. Until now, they were necessary on many computers because Windows had problems with supporting even such popular formats as rar and 7z. It’s surprising that Microsoft has decided to release such an update only now.

Unfortunately, the new update surprisingly does not allow you to password-protect files when compressing and unpacking archives protected in this way. Yet we very often receive bank account statements and other confidential data in password-protected files. For some users, additional applications such as 7-ZIP or WinRAR will still be necessary. When asked by Bleeping Computer, Microsoft did not want to reveal whether password support will be added in the future.

The update in question is optional. This means it won’t be automatically installed on Windows 11 computers (like security patches). To download it, go to Windows Update, manually check for new updates, then select “KB5031455” from the list and click “download and install”.