WinRAR on Windows 11 gets faster, 7-Zip and NanaZip receive improvements too

Windows 11 promo

WinRAR, the popular archiving software, has received a beta update today and it brings several improvements and bug fixes. Everyone loves a bit of a performance bump, and the beta has a couple of them.

First, the developer says that the Windows 11 context menu will now pop up faster. This reminds of a recent Windows 11 update under KB5046756, which also improved the performance of the Windows 11 (right-click) context menu. Other than that, the compression speed also gets a boost as the new version fixes a performance bug.

The release notes also note "numerous" improvements related to the app's dark mode. You can find the full changelog for WinRAR 7.10 Beta 2 below:

Numerous dark mode improvements and fixes.

"Dark mode" options in "Settings/Interface" are renamed to "Color mode"

It takes less time for WinRAR items in Windows 11 context menu to appear, when right clicking a lot of selected archives.

Exporting settings with "Export settings to file" command of "Options/Import and export" submenu doesn't trigger User Account Control prompts anymore.

"Bad archive" exit code 13 is returned in the command line mode, when attempting to unpack a non-RAR archive with .rar file extension.

"External viewer name" field in "Settings/Viewer" recognizes "\", "..\" or ".\" in the beginning of path, allowing to specify paths relative to WinRAR program folder. Paths like \utils\viewer.exe, ..\viewer.exe or .\viewer.exe can be helpful for WinRAR installation on USB drive without a fixed drive letter

Bugs fixed:

compression speed could be lower than expected for rare specific combination of source data in a non-solid archive;

console RAR fell into infinite loop, when trying to process user input in prompts like the overwrite prompt in Windows 7;

running executables from archive subfolders failed with "Cannot execute" error;

WinRAR.ini contents could be reset if "Reuse existing window" option was on and multiple archives were opened in the same WinRAR window.

WinRAR is not the only file-archiving app that has received an update. Earlier this week, 7-Zip and NanaZip also received updates.

Version 24.09 of 7-Zip gets increased default dictionary size values for LZMA/LZMA2 compression, wherein it now goes up to 256 MB for 64-bit and 64 MB for 32-bit versions, respectively. The software has also received checksum improvements and more.

The changelog is given below:

The default dictionary size values for LZMA/LZMA2 compression methods were increased:
         dictionary size   compression level
  v24.08  v24.09  v24.09   
          32-bit  64-bit    
    8 MB   16 MB   16 MB   -mx4
   16 MB   32 MB   32 MB   -mx5 : Normal
   32 MB   64 MB   64 MB   -mx6
   32 MB   64 MB  128 MB   -mx7 : Maximum
   64 MB   64 MB  256 MB   -mx8
   64 MB   64 MB  256 MB   -mx9 : Ultra
The default dictionary size values for 32-bit versions of LZMA/LZMA2 don't exceed 64 MB.

7-Zip now can calculate the following hash checksums: SHA-512, SHA-384, SHA3-256 and MD5.

APM and HFS support was improved.

If an archive update operation uses a temporary archive folder and the archive is moved to the destination folder, 7-Zip shows the progress of moving the archive file, as this operation can take a long time if the archive is large.

The bug was fixed: 7-Zip File Manager didn't propagate Zone.Identifier stream for extracted files from nested archives (if there is open archive inside another open archive).

Some bugs were fixed

Meanwhile, the NanaZip update patches a Zstandard decompression remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that is tracked under CVE-2024-11477 (previously ZDI-CAN-24346). It is noteworthy that 7-Zip has already fixed this in version 24.07.

The full changelog for NanaZip 5.0 Preview 0 (5.0.1188.0) is given below:

This release includes all the improvements from NanaZip 3.1 (3.1.1080.0).

Update Brazilian Portuguese translation. (Contributed by maisondasilva.)

Make sure NanaZip Core (except the Self Extracting Executables) and NanaZip Classic using ucrtbase.dll with 10.0.19041.0 version or later.

Update Mile.Windows.Helpers to 1.0.671. (https://github.com/ProjectMile/Mile.Windows.Helpers/tree/1.0.671.0)

Move NanaZip console version to NanaZip.Core project. (Not used in NanaZip MSIX package because we need to release the next preview to contain the CVE-2024-11477 fix in NanaZip 3.1.)

Remove C++/WinRT dependency for NanaZip.Codecs and NanaZip.Frieren.

Add GetDpiForWindowWrapper for NanaZip.Frieren.DarkMode to fix the legacy Windows compatibility issues.

Remove VC-LTL dependency for the Self Extracting Executables related projects.

Adjust the compilation configurations to optimize the binary size for the Self Extracting Executables.

Use Mile.Windows.UniCrt (https://github.com/ProjectMile/Mile.Windows.UniCrt) instead of VC-LTL.

Update NanaZip.Specification.SevenZip header file.

Start to simplify the NanaZip specific decoders and encoders implementation.

Synchronize the BLAKE3 implementation to 1.5.5. (https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3/releases/tag/1.5.5)

Synchronize the RHash implementation to the latest master branch which is after v1.4.5. (rhash/RHash@cf2adf2)

Enable disabling child process creation for NanaZip Self Extracting Executables. (Except installer mode of Self Extracting Executables, which compiled binaries is not provided in the NanaZip MSIX package.)