How many of you have downloaded a file ending in ‘.rar’ before? I’m sure by now, mostly all of you. The first time you downloaded it, you wondered what it was, what to do with it, and why someone would choose this ‘rar’ format at all…
Then you were lead to a program called WinRAR to extract its contents…
First, let me explain what a ‘rar’ file is, and why it even exists. By now, I’m sure you’ve seen a .zip file. We used to use winzip to create zip files. These files allow you to combine many files together, or maybe even just one file… and ‘compress them’. Do you have a file that’s 500mb big? Zip it up in a .zip file, and it’ll be less, like probably 413mb or so. Pretty cool, eh?
Well, rar files are another way of ‘zipping’ files. It’s a file compression/archiving format. Effectively, it’s the same thing as zipping a file, except the resulting file ends in .rar now instead of .zip, and the file size is smaller. This came about to satisfy the need for transferring files over the internet faster. It takes less time to download a 387mb file than it does a 413mb file…
Now, what is WinRAR? WinRAR is a program designed to extract or create rar files. What’s wrong with that? Well, nothing… but it’s the additional pieces of WinRAR I don’t like.
First off, it fails for a practical reason: it lacks in support for many file formats. It’s mainly designed around creating and extracting zip and rar files, but with other files added in as an afterthought. According to their site, they support (in addition to zip and rar):
- CAB
- ARJ
- LZH
- TAR
- GZ and TAR.GZ
- BZ2 and TAR.BZ2
- ACE
- UUE
- JAR (Java Archive)
- ISO (ISO9660 – CD image)
- 7Z
- XZ
- Z (Unix compress)
Wow. Pretty impressive, right? Sure, until you consider the fact that it’s missing about half of the formats used out there. Formats like these:
- CHM
- CPIO
- CramFS
- DEB
- DMG
- FAT
- HFS
- LZMA
- MBR
- MSI
- NSIS
- NTFS
- RPM
- SquashFS
- UDF
- VHD
- WIM
- XAR
Now, are you realistically going to see even half of these formats? No, probably not. But I don’t like downloading something strange that I’ve never seen before only to find out that my favorite product for unzipping it doesn’t work.
Here’s another reason I don’t like WinRAR: that annoying “please register” popup after 30 days of use. I know I know… it’s a free product, so there has to be some cost to me for using it, but since I’ve been spoiled with a much better free product, this sort of thing annoys me to no end.
And finally: lack of forethought on the user experience. I’ll explain the better product in a minute to illustrate this point more. After having been spoiled with a better product, I’m actually kinda sad these features aren’t readily available in WinRAR like they are in the other product.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: so what product should I use then?
It is superior to WinRAR in every way.
- It’s free with no annoying popup.
- It’s open-source, so it’s always being improved.
- It’s cross-platform, so if you’ve learned to use it in one OS, you’ll know how to use it in others.
- Its .7z file compression format compresses even more than .rar does.
- It’ll open rar files and rar file parts (you can split a compressed file into multiple smaller files for easier transfer on the internet… takes the same amount of time to download in the long run, but it’s all in shorter bursts… helps with latency). The 7z file format is also capable of this.
- It opens ALL file formats mentioned earlier.
- Better features….
Allow me to explain “better features”… in my right-click menu, I can add a file to a zip or 7z archive, and I can also extract an archive really quickly. With 2 clicks, I’m ready to go. In WinRAR, this is not always the case, and because I’ve grown so accustomed to this efficient 2-click method, I think WinRAR fails in the functionality department.
I also think that with .7z being the easier-made and better compressed file format, I don’t understand why rar is even used anymore. There are people that still swear by it for some stupid reason. 7zip was released only 4 years after WinRAR, and that was in 1999. File sharing wasn’t nearly as popular then as it is now. So I dislike WinRAR because of it’s unnecessary popularity. It doesn’t make any sense; 7zip has completely deprecated it.
So seriously… stop using WinRAR. It’s absolutely inferior, and needs to die. No WinRAR, I’m not paying money to extract some dumb file I downloaded on the internet. That’s asinine. Please… use 7zip already :)