Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Buried among the AI announcements and minor Windows 11 feature tweaks that Microsoft announced yesterday was an addition that will solve a minor but longstanding headache for Windows users: The operating system is finally moving beyond .zip archive support and will soon be gaining the ability to work with RAR, 7-zip, .tar, and many other kinds of archives.

Built-in support for these different archive types will be especially relevant for developers and people who use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, both instances where non-zip compressed archives are more commonly used.

Microsoft told The Verge that the feature would be added “later this week” to a “work-in-progress” build; it may or may not be exclusive to Windows Insider preview builds before rolling out to the general public.