WinRAR 7.12 Released: Classic Archiver Gets Faster and Smarter

On June 24, 2025, the legendary file archiver WinRAR 7.12 and its command-line counterpart RAR 7.12 were officially released by Eugene Roshal and the RARLAB team. The new version is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and Android. It also includes source code under a restricted license.

While RAR7 still doesn’t beat LZMA2 (used in 7-Zip) in compression ratio when using dictionaries up to 4GB, it offers much faster compression speeds. It also supports features like recovery records and file timestamp fields (creation, modification, and last access), which many competitors lack. Interestingly, the recently released 7-Zip 24.09 now supports the updated RAR format as well.

Key Fixes and Improvements

This version addresses a serious security issue in previous Windows builds of WinRAR, UnRAR, and related tools. Malicious archives could trick the software into extracting files to unexpected locations. The problem did not affect Unix versions or the Android app.

Other improvements include safer HTML report generation (to prevent harmful tag injection), accurate testing of recovery volumes when used with archive tests, and better timestamp handling for Unix files modified on Windows systems.

Still Loved After All These Years

Despite being over 30 years old, WinRAR continues to sell around 10,000 licenses per month. Since 2022, the app no longer supports Windows XP and older versions like 95 or ME, but it still runs smoothly on modern systems.

WinRAR 7 remains free to try, showing only a gentle reminder about the trial period—or none at all for lifetime license holders.