> people who want to compress files in that format will still need a third party app like WinRAR. We would like to believe that loophole will keep the company going for some time.

Yeah but like 99.7% of everyone that ever touches a RAR file only do so to extract something.

Then again, most of those same people probably use the unlicensed version anyway.

Yay I'm in the 0.3%

WinRAR extracts content much faster than Windows does, use it for zip files too.

Also the user experience is decent. I never actually liked how Windows handled zip files. With WinRAR I can just open the file and run stuff from there. With Windows it has not been that simple.

I never truly got around the thing how zips look like fake folders.

For sure, right click extract to folder is my go to.

The WinRAR GUI also provides some neat features I haven't seen before, or at least not presented easily. I needed to delete a particular file from a bunch of archives (ZIPs) that was in some of them, but not in others and I didn't know which archives had it. WinRAR can search multiple archives within the archives for a specific file or extension, shows the output in the file pane and I was able to delete them all in one hit. Very niche feature, guaranteed not to appear in Windows when support is added. I'm a slave for heavy functionality software - it's bloat until you need it.

I was always a little unclear why people used this at all. What does it offer over, say, semi-modern zip files? (I have dim memories of early zip files having weird restrictions on size and number of files, but those seem to have been long since resolved).

Did Microsoft aquire a license from WinRAR or they just reverse engineered the format themselves?