7-Zip 24.03 Beta: Download Free File Archiver for Windows (64-bit, 32-bit)

UPDATE: Release of 7-Zip 24.03 beta and 23.01 stable version to public.

A new version of popular file archiver software 7-Zip has been released for Windows, Linux and MacOS. It includes several new features, bug fixes and improvements which are mentioned below in this article.

What is 7-Zip File Archiver Program?

Most of the times we here at AskVG post various articles which feature themes, utilities, registry scripts, etc. These things are provided for download in ZIP file format and we always suggest you to use 7-Zip to extract those ZIP files.

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7-Zip is a free file archive utility developed by Igor Pavlov. It allows you to unpack/extract wide range of formats like ZIP, RAR, GZIP, 7z, RPM, MSI, ISO, CAB, DMG, VHD, WIM, TAR, etc. 7-Zip is one of the most popular file archiver tools available on Internet. The default file format used by this software is 7z.

7_Zip_Free_File_Archive_Utility.png

It can be installed in almost all Windows versions including Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11. Its command line version is also available for Linux/Unix and MacOS.

7-Zip is an open source program. Most of its source code is under the GNU LGPL license. The unRAR code is under a mixed license: GNU LGPL + unRAR restrictions.

7-Zip Features List

  • High compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression
  • For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
  • Supported formats for packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
  • Supported formats for unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.
  • Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
  • Self-extracting capability for 7z format
  • Integration with Windows Shell
  • Powerful File Manager
  • Powerful command line version
  • Plugin for FAR Manager
  • Localizations for 79 languages

Its a very lightweight software and doesn’t take much memory of your system.

What’s New in 7-Zip 24.03 Beta Version

The latest beta (testing) version of 7-Zip comes with following changes and improvements:

  • 7-Zip now can use new RISCV filter for compression to 7z and xz archives. RISCV filter can increase compression ratio for data containing executable files compiled for RISC-V architecture.
  • The speed for LZMA and LZMA2 decompression in ARM64 version for Windows was increased by 20%-60%.
  • 7-Zip GUI and 7-Zip File Manager can ask user permission to unpack RAR archives that require big amount of memory, if the dictionary size in RAR archive is larger than 4 GB.
  • New switch -smemx{size}g : to set allowed memory usage limit for RAR archive unpacking. RAR archives can use dictionary up 64 GB. Default allowed limit for RAR unpacking is 4 GB.
  • 7zg.exe (7-Zip GUI): -y switch disables user requests and messages.
  • 7-Zip shows hash methods XXH64 and BLAKE2sp in context menu.
  • -slmu switch : to show timestamps as UTC instead of LOCAL TIME.
  • -slsl switch : in console 7-Zip for Windows : to show file paths with linux path separator slash ‘/’ instead of backslash separator ‘\’.
  • 7-Zip supports .sha256 files that use backslash path separator ‘\’.
  • Some bugs were fixed.
  • The bug in 7-Zip 24.02 was fixed: It couldn’t open ISO archives.

What’s New in 7-Zip 23.01 Stable Version

The latest public stable version of 7-Zip comes with following changes and improvements:

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  • 7-Zip can now use new ARM64 filter for compression to 7z and xz archives. ARM64 filter can increase compression ratio for data containing executable files compiled for ARM64 (AArch64) architecture.
  • 7-Zip now parses executable files (that have exe and dll filename extensions) before compressing, and it selects appropriate filter for each parsed file: BCJ or BCJ2 filter for x86 executable files, ARM64 filter for ARM64 executable files. Previous versions by default used x86 filter BCJ or BCJ2 for all exe/dll files.
  • Default section size for BCJ2 filter was changed from 64 MiB to 240 MiB. It can increase compression ratio for executable files larger than 64 MiB.
  • UDF: support was improved.
  • cpio: support for hard links.
  • Some changes and optimizations in WIM creation code.
  • When new 7-Zip creates multivolume archive, 7-Zip keeps only those volumes in open state that still can be changed. Previous versions kept all volumes in open state until the end of the archive creation.
  • 7-Zip for Linux and macOS now can reduce the number of simultaneously open files, when 7-Zip opens, extracts or creates multivolume archive. It allows to avoid the failures for cases with big number of volumes, because there is a limitation for number of open files allowed for a single program in Linux and macOS.
  • There are optimizations in code for 7-Zip’s context menu in Explorer: the speed of preparing of the menu showing was improved for cases when big number of files were selected by external program for context menu that contains 7-Zip menu commands.
  • There are changes in code for the drag-and-drop operations to and from 7-Zip File Manager. The drag-and-drop operation with right button of mouse now is supported for some cases.
  • [Fixed] ZIP archives: if multithreaded zip compression was performed with more than one file to stdout stream (-so switch), 7-zip didn’t write “data descriptor” for some files.
  • [Fixed] ext4 archives: 7-Zip couldn’t correctly extract symbolic link to directory from ext4 archives.
  • [Fixed] HFS and APFS archives: 7-Zip incorrectly decoded uncompressed blocks (64 KiB) in compressed forks.
  • The page “Language” in 7-Zip’s menu Tools/Options now shows information about selected translation, including the number of translated lines.
  • Some other bugs were fixed.

Download Links of 7-Zip Latest Version

7-Zip can be downloaded for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows OS, macOS and Linux.

You can download the stable and beta versions of 7-Zip using following link:

Download 7-Zip Stable and Beta Versions

Do you also use 7-Zip in your system? If you use any other file archiver, please let us know in your comment…

Also Check:

[Tip] How to Remove or Customize 7-Zip Context Menu (Right-Click Menu) Options

Published in: Software

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. 7-Zip 9.25 alpha was released quite a long ago… =.= (2011-09-16)

    dl.7-zip.org/7z95.exe
    dl.7-zip.org/7z925-x64.msi

    What’s new after 7-Zip 9.23 beta:

    – LZMA decompression speed was improved.
    – “compress and send to email” code was improved to support more email clients.
    – New command “h” to calculate hash values CRC-32, CRC-64, SHA-256 or SHA-1 for files on disk.
    – New -spf switch to store full file paths including drive letter to archive. If you use that switch with extract command, please check that file names in archive are correct.
    – Some bugs were fixed.

    NOTE: New -spf switch feature is for testing only!
    That code is still under development. Please write about any bugs there.
    It stores full file paths to archive only if you specify these full paths in command.

  2. I use WinRAR, but my pc no longer supports it(Windows XP, Gawd knows how) so 7zip

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