A new final release of the open-source compression software for Windows has just been released. Beta releases have existed since the last release in 2010 but development certainly picked up in the last few months resulting in the first final release in five years. The software works well and has an open license, making it fairly popular with features beyond the simple zip tools built into Windows (for those people that stop immediately downloading WinZip or WinRar on new computers).
Still hosted on SourceForge, unfortunately, the software has quite a few changes after being five years in the making from the current version 9.20. If you’re wondering about the big version jump to 15.12, the versioning system indicates revision 20 in 2009 and the new release is the 12th revision in 2015.
The History file of 7-Zip indicates a variety of new features beyond the typical bug fixes:
- Using a new installer
- 7-Zip now can extract .zipx (WinZip) archives that use xz compression.
- 7-Zip now can extract RAR5 archives.
- 7-Zip now can extract solid WIM archives with LZMS compression.
- 7-Zip now can extract GPT images and single file QCOW2, VMDK, VDI images.
- 7-Zip now can extract ext3 and ext4 (Linux file system) images.
- 7-Zip now can extract ext2 and multivolume VMDK images.
The software is available for download from www.7-zip.org.