The WinRAR Approach
19 comments
·May 21, 2025lifthrasiir
It is not about goodwill; it is more about making laypersons familiar with the software so that corporate licenses can be sold. This has been a very much established BM for sharewares.
jimbob45
Protip: there are some kickass WinRAR themes out there.
LeoPanthera
(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...)
It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance.
7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
theonemind
WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual
Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people
UberFly
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.
sureIy
"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.
9dev
Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.
wongarsu
The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost.
Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those.
7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses.
I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license
ed_mercer
LGR covered this extensively https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg
IncreasePosts
Does anyone have any estimates for how much money WinRAR has made over the years, and for whom? Is it just a one man shop, a big company with multiple developers, or what?
from_endor
win.rar GmbH is a German corporation and as such is required to post their financial statements to the federal "Handelsregister". If you google the exact company name, you'll quickly find the Northdata site for them (Northdata is a crawler that aggregates Handelsregister data) [1]. According to that, they made ~1M€ in earnings in 2023.
fortran77
There are some clues:
https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890
Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.
TheRealPomax
You're on the internet my friend, you can literally just look this up yourself with half a minute of searching.
IncreasePosts
This isn't some fact that is going to appear in the encyclopedia Brittanica. If you actually search for it, you'll find a bunch of content like "if you assume they sell 5 million copies per year at $10 per copy, then they must make $50M/year!!".
I won't say it's likely, but a number of times on this very forum I got the inside scoop by asking a question and having someone in the know respond directly to me. Off the top of my head, Patrick Collision and Walter Bright have filled me in on details that people otherwise just speculated about online.
codr7
And how did that work out for WinRAR?
People don't give a shit from my experience, they will take whatever they can get away with.
forgetfreeman
Well enough according to their recent financial disclosures.
> If you're familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you'll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired.
I remember Paint Shop Pro being even more famous for this. I certainly got to day five hundred and something of the 30 day trial. I seem to remember an interview with the creator where he was grateful even to users that didn't pay because they helped sort knowledge of it. Sadly, I think later versions made it a harder limit.