On 22.12.2011 17:45, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Jonathan M Davis"<jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1834.1324571496.24802.digitalmar...@puremagic.com...
On Thursday, December 22, 2011 06:25:42 a wrote:
Why are you ignoring the statement about 7z having the same
accessibility
level as rar? Rar files are not rare and users who can open rar files (on
Windows usually with WinRAR or 7zip) can also open 7z files.
But not without installing 3rd party software. Windows can handle zip
files out
of the box. It can't handle the others. rar would have exactly the same
problem as 7z files (though from what I've see rar files are much more
commonly
used). We _could_ use a file format other than zip, but then we'd be
requiring
that the user download a 3rd party app just to be able to open the file,
which
is _not_ the case with zip.
Once again:
1. "If you're a programmer, or even just a power user, you have absolutely
no
excuse not to *already* have a 7z-capable program [EDIT: such as WinRAR, for
instance] installed."
2. "What the hell programmer is limited to whatever archive support just
happens to be
built into Windows?"
Even *in addition* to all of that, the built-in windows support for zip is
*extremely* dummy^H^H^H^H^Haverage-Joe -oriented. Page after page of
hand-holding "wizard" *just* to "extract here"? I can't imagine any
programmer or power user even being capable of putting up with that for more
than a few days before finally just grabbing WinRAR, etc. And I'm not just
speculating: Honestly, I've never even known *one* programmer or power user
who actually used Windows's built-in zip support.
According to sourceforge, 7zip for Windows was downloaded 100 million
times last year. WinRAR is probably a lot more popular than 7zip.
There are about 1000 million PCs in use worldwide, so it sounds like >
25% of all Windows users have 7z support. Among developers it must be
much higher - maybe 90% ?
