Igor Pavlov, developer of 7-Zip open source software, released yesterday the 18.06 version.
7-Zip for those who do not know it, is a free, open source file archiving program that can uncompress all known types of files such as zip, rar, ext, iso, vim, tar, gzip, 7z etc compress into 7z, xz, bzip2, gzip, tar, zip and wim formats. It also supports the Greek language and has the ability to encrypt in AES-256 in 7z and zip formats.
It is one of the free programs not only used by the European Commission but also finances third-party hackers to conduct bug surveys to ensure that the program is always safe.
The new version is the third and final version for 2018 and is available as download for Windows and other supported operating systems from the official site. Existing 7-Zip installations can be upgraded to the new version by installing 18.06 on top of the existing installation. Windows users who prefer portable software can also download from here.
The official list of changes lists the following changes and improvements.
- The LZMA / LZMA2 compression speed was increased by 3-10% and there were minor changes in the compression ratio.
- Some bugs were corrected.
- The error in 7-Zip 18.02-18.05 was corrected: there was a memory leak in the xz decoder.
- 7-Zip 18.02-18.05 used only one CPU thread to create a bz2 file.
The two key new features of 7-Zip 18.06 are the compression performance improvements for LZMA and LZMA2 compression formats and the correction of a memory leak in the xz decoder.
The program 7-Zip is one of the top-5 file compression programs along with the history WinRAR, the WinISO, the WinZIP and Bandizip.
