2006 May 04 ~ Chris Pirillo

Steve Rubel

1 Comment (Add) | Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 11:47pm

[Steve Rubel]

WinZip vs. WinRAR

22 Comments (Add) | Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 8:14pm

I'm not usually passionate enough to stir up the debate, but Ed Bott started it this morning with his Corel completes destruction of WinZip post. Like Ed, I've been a WinZip user for years – since Windows 3.1. I appreciated that my initial registration fee would apply to all subsequent versions – until the most recent version. Then, the world started to distribute RAR files, and WinZip was all like “WTF?” and I was all like “Yeah, it's another compression format.” If you only have enough room for one compressed file manager, WinRAR should be it.
On this machine, I have both WinZIP and WinRAR installed – but the next PC will only have WinRAR. It does everything WinZip does – and does it faster. I still don't like the WinRAR interface as much as WinZip, but at least WinRAR is skinnable. WinRAR's nag isn't as naggy, either (although I've registered it so I don't see that anyway). And if that doesn't win you over, remember that WinRAR can read and extract from ISO file. In fact, I don't think that (in practice) I've ever had a time when WinRAR couldn't unpack a file for me. Face it, folks – WinZip is dead.