stick with 7-zip. the fact thats its open source is reason enough to choose it over winrar.
That’s fine, but how exactly is this a benefit to the user? Because WinRAR could one day disappear forever? That seems unlikely to the point of ridiculousness. Sure, I could get hit by a meteor tomorrow, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to use that risk as a justification for any of my behavior.
WinRAR is free anyway… trial period never expires.
C’mon, that’s cheesy. If you use something consistently over a long period of time, you should give something back. And WinRAR is so reasonably priced.
rather than just blindly picking one based on raw speed, or GUI
I’m picking WinRAR because it offers the best efficiency ratio of compression size to compression time. This is backed up by the data from a number of compression studies. I’m too impatient to wait 5x - 10x longer for 2% to 4% more compression.
But I totally agree, as Rick Brewster illustrated, there are times when this can make sense. Just not many that a typical user would run into.
As far as I’m concerned bz2 should be the future
WinRAR can decompress bz2, but you’re right: it would be nice if WinRAR could create bz2 archives as well. More choice is always better.