RARLAB is the company behind WinRAR and the well-known type of RAR compression. Just released the Final version of WinRAR 5.90.
The new version of the shareware program WinRAR comes with a lot of news characteristics, improvements and fixes. Its previous version was 5.80 which was released in December 2019.
WinRAR 5.90 is already available for Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux and Android operating systems. Existing users can download the latest version from the RARLAB website and install it on an existing pre-installed version. WinRAR does not support automatic updates.
Those who want to see in detail what the new version provides can go to release notes from here. In general, however, the new version brings the following:
- RAR compression speed has been improved in systems with processors with 16 or more cores.
- The maximum number of threads that uses WinRAR has increased from 32 to 64. The -mt command line switch accepts values between 1 and 64 to reflect the change.
- The new threads field in the settings replaces the multi-reference parameter. Accepts values between 1 and the number of CPU cores.
- When browsing compressed files, the sizes of compressed and uncompressed packages are now displayed.
- RAR5 file repair performance improved.
- The progress bar and cancel button are displayed if reading the files takes a long time.
- Compression and decompression progress windows can now be resized.
Several bugs have been fixed in the new version, including an incorrect repair notification that displays "Recovery record is corrupt" when it is not. While the message did not affect a successful repair, it was annoying to users.
Briefly
WinRAR is still a very popular file compression application, despite the fact that there are now many free alternatives solutions like PeaZip or Bandizip or the 7-zip and others. This program paved the way for compression, introduced the .rar extension and therefore remains at the top.