But for sharing files with other people, ZIP is still king. Even 7z or RAR is niche. Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger.
You can use ZSTD with ZIP files too! It's compression method 93 (see https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT which is the official ZIP file specification).
Which reveals that "everyone can open a ZIP file" is a lie. Sure, everyone can open a ZIP file, as long as that file uses only a limited subset of the ZIP format features. Which is why formats which use ZIP as a base (Java JAR files, OpenDocument files, new Office files) standardize such a subset; but for general-purpose ZIP files, there's no such standard.
(I have encountered such ZIP files in the wild; "unzip" can't decompress them, though p7zip worked for these particular ZIP files.)
Some things are used for interoperability, and switching to a newer incompatible thing loses all of its value.
Interestingly, I think if you examine the errors in the analogy you made, you’ll better understand why simply spinning off a highly tweaked zip format into its own thing with its own file extension might make more sense than stretching the existing format and hoping everyone adopts the most recent changes.
That makes them useful for transferring an entire set of files that someone will want all or none of, e.g. source code, but terrible for a set of files that someone might want to access arbitrary files from.
I know what you mean, I’m not being pedantic, but I just realized it’s been 19 years. I wonder when we’ll start calling them “Office files”.
Probably around the same time the save icon becomes something other than a 3 1/2" floppy disk.
if you cant open it, well.. then stop using 90ies winzip
How about software developers learn to keep software working on old OSes and old hardware?
Installing new software has a real time and hassle cost, and how much time are you actually saving over the long run? It depends on your usage patterns.
Right, and when were these "final updates" made? are you suggesting 95, 98 still sees ACTIVE security support?
I would also expect people to be able to decode h265 in an mp4 file.
Your proposal seems, to word it bluntly, retarded. You would have mp4 frozen for h264 for ETERNITY, and then invent a new format as replacement? or you would just say "god has bestowed upon the world h264, and it shall be the LAST CODEC EVER!".
get with the program. Things change, you cannot expect to be forwards compatible for ever. Sometimes people have to switch to newer versions of software.
If your customer is stuck in the 90s because his 90s technology works perfectly fine and he has no intention to fix things that are not broken. Then deliver stuff that is compatible with 90s technology. He will be happy, will continue to work with you and you will make money.
If your customer is using the latest technologies and values size efficiency, then use the latest codecs.
I usually default to being conservative, because those who are up to date usually don't have a problem with bigger files, but those who are not are going to have a problem with recent formats. Maybe overly so, but that's my experience with working with big companies with decades long lifecycles.
Your job is not to lecture your customer, unless he asked for it. And if he asked for it, he probably expects better arguments that "update your software, idiot". Your job is to deliver what works for him. Now, of course, it is your right to be picky and leave money on the table, I will be happy to go after you and take it.
Professionally I can definitely support old stuff. It costs extra most often.
Conservative doesnt have to be stuck. I am not recommending we send h266 to everyone now, but h265 is well supported, as is AV1.
lzma support in zip has been widely supported for many years at this point. I am going to be choosing my "sane defaults", and if someone has a problem with that, they can simply do what they need to do to open it, or provide a damn good reason for me to go out of my way.
In many (most?) cases, it's possible to get better compression and higher quality if you're willing to spend the CPU cycles on it, meaning that YouTube could both reduce their encoding load and increase quality at the same time, and content creators could put out better quality videos that maintain better detail.
It would certainly take longer to upload the multiple multiple versions of everything, and definitely it would take longer to encode, but it would also ease YouTube's burden and produce a better result.
Ah well, a guy can dream.
So you could upload a crazy high bitrate file to them for a 20 min video which I suspect would be close to "raw" quality.
I don't know how many corners youtube cut on encoding though.
I suspect most of the problem is people exporting 4k at a 'web' bitrate preset (15mbit/s?), which is actually gonna get murdered on the 2nd encode more than encoding quality on youtubes side?
Support for which was added in 2020:
> On 15 June 2020, Zstandard was implemented in version 6.3.8 of the zip file format with codec number 93, deprecating the previous codec number of 20 as it was implemented in version 6.3.7, released on 1 June.[36][37]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zstd#Usage
So I'm not sure how widely deployed it would be.
You probably mean the "unzip" command, which https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html lists as 6.0 being the latest, released on 20 April 2009. Relevant to this discussion, new in that release are support for 64-bit file sizes, bzip2 compression method, and UTF-8 filenames.
The "zip" command is listed at https://infozip.sourceforge.net/Zip.html as 3.0 being the latest, released on 7 July 2008. New in that release are also support for 64-bit file sizes, bzip2 compression method, and UTF-8 filenames.
It would be great if both (or at least unzip) were updated to also support LZMA/XZ/ZSTD as compression methods, but given that there have been no new releases for over fifteen years, I'm not too hopeful.
Why ? Xz supports xz, zstd supports zstd. Why should unzip support xz or rar or gz ?
They are not regarded kindly.
You're assuming things because things are already done insecurely. You can authenticate the self-extractor as well as the extracted content. The user gets a nice message "This is a 7zip self-extracting archive sent to you by Bob containing the files below".
As an incident responder, I've seen much more of regular archives being used to social engineer users than self-extracting archives, because self-extracting is not "content executing". it is better for social engineering for users to establish trust in the payload first by having them manually open the archive. if something "weird" like self-extraction happens first, it might feel less trustworthy.
Oh and by the way, things like PyInstaller or electron apps are already self-extracting and self-executing archives. So are JAR files and android APK's.
however, once extracted, jar files do contain executable code, and that is a security issue. the java model pays attention to security, but if code can do something, it can do something bad. if it can't do something, it's not very useful, is it.
People also tend to care about how much time they spend on compression for each incremental % of compression performance and zstd tends to be a Pareto frontier for that (at least for open source algorithms)
Unfortunately for the hoster, they either have to eat the cost of the added bandwidth from a larger file or have people complain about slow decompression.
My use cases are usually source code, SQL dumps and log files.
Sometimes xz gave marginally better results, but difference was well below 1%
raw size: 9612344 B
zstd --ultra -22 --long=31 => 376181 B (3.91% original, 4.088s compress, 0.013s decompress)
xz -z -9 xml => 353700 B (3.68% original, 0.729s compress, 0.032s decompress)
zstd -17 --long=31 could match the compression time of xz, but the size is bigger (405602 B, 4.22% original)
If you compare only the compressed size (not to the original size), .zst would be about 6-15% larger than .xz
https://www.hydrogen18.com/blog/apk-the-strangest-format.htm...
I was running "zstd --ultra --threads=0" which I assumed was asking it for the absolute maximum
I redid your experiments with rust-wasm-1.83.0-r0.apk:
size perc c.time d.time
uncompressed: 290072064 - -
gzipped original: 105255109 36.29% -
bzip2 -9: 107099379 36.92% 21.1s 11.0s
bzip3 -b511: 73539847 25.35% 28.9s 32.0s
xz --extreme -9: 71010672 24.48% 142.0s 3.1s
lzip -9: 70964413 24.46% 173.5s 5.3s
zstd --ultra -22: 48288499 16.64% 155.6s 0.4s
uncompressed: 1512662084
xz --extreme -9: 508431572 12:47
zstd --ultra -21: 508432560 12:44
zstd --ultra -22: 494517545 14:00
If the email data is mostly text with markup (like HTML/XML), you might want to try bzip3 too.
It's also possible that a large part of your email is actually already-compressed binary data (like PDFs and images) possibly encoded in base-64. In that case it's likely that all tools are pretty good at compressing the text and headers, but can do little to compress the attachments, which would explain why the results you get are so close.
bzip3 -b511: 580771424 8:51
Overall I'm still slightly biased towards using zstd as a default, in that I believe:
1. zstd will almost always be among fastest formats for decompression, which is obviously nice-to-have everything else being equal.
2. zstd can achieve a very high compression ratio, depending on tuning; rarely will zstd significantly underperform the next best option.
I don't know what your use case is, but it seems to be quite a niche.
Hence why PeaZip is so popular, and J-Zip used to be before it was stuffed with adware.
Granted Windows 11 has started doing the same for its zip and 7zip compressors.
Same trick goes for opening archives or executables (Installers) as archives.
Since you're asking, the answer is no. 7-Zip has an efficient and elegant UI.
The author updates code in the github repo....by drag and drop file uploads. https://github.com/peazip/PeaZip/commits/sources/
Desktop software usability peaked sometime in the late 90s, early 2000s. There's a reason why 7zip still looks like ~2004
Instead you chose to make a useless snarky comment. Be better.
On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.
It includes the above patches as well as few QoL features.
Even on latest Windows 11 takes minutes to do what 7-Zip does in seconds.
Goes to show how good all those leetcode interviews turn out.
on anything else - either directly zstd or tar
It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
The more likely thing to eat into its relevance is now that Windows has built-in basic support for zipping/unzipping EDIT: other formats*, which relegates 7-zip to more niche uses.
That makes it 'good enough' for the vast majority of people, even if it's not as fast or fully-featured as 7-Zip.
That allows it to be a default that 'just works' for most people without installing anything extra.
The vast majority of users don't care about the extra performance or functionality of a tool like 7-zip. They just need a way to open and send files and the Windows built-in tool is 'good enough' for them.
That is enough to bite into 7-Zip's share of users.
Agreed. The only thing I think it has been missing is PAR support. I think they should consider incorporating one of the par2cmdline forks and porting that code to Windows as well so that it has recovery options similar to WinRAR. It's not used by everyone but that should deprecate any use cases for WinRAR in my opinion.