What's New in WinZip 9.0

Major Changes in Version 9.0

Improvements in WinZip® 9.0 concentrate on its core functionality: compression, capacity, and a new, advanced data encryption capability. Using WinZip 9.0, you can compress more data, compress it better, and protect your sensitive documents with far greater security.

Details of these and other enhancements follow.

Advanced encryption

WinZip 9.0 supports 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption, which provide much greater cryptographic security than the traditional Zip 2.0 encryption method used in earlier versions of WinZip.

WinZip 9.0's advanced encryption (FIPS-197 certified) uses the Rijndael cryptographic algorithm which, in 2001, was specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 197 as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

After a three-year competition, the AES was announced by NIST as an approved encryption technique for use by the U.S. government, private businesses, and individuals. When properly implemented as a key component of an overall security protocol, the AES permits a very high degree of cryptographic security, yet is fast and efficient in operation.

WinZip's AES encryption is just as easy to use as traditional Zip 2.0 encryption: all you have to do is select the encryption strength and specify your password.

Note: recipients to whom you send AES-encrypted Zip files must have a compatible Zip file utility in order to decrypt the files. We have published the full specification for creating WinZip-compatible AES-encrypted Zip files, and we expect that other Zip file utility vendors will provide support for the format.

Greater capacity

In addition to supporting the original Zip file format, WinZip 9.0 also supports the 64-bit extensions to the Zip file format. The extended format lets you store all the data you need in Zip files of virtually unlimited size.

The original Zip file format limited the number of member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes, the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions. Using the extended format, the member file size, Zip file size, and number of member files you can add to a Zip file are limited only by your system's resources.

WinZip remains fully compatible with the original file format and uses the original format whenever possible. WinZip uses the 64-bit extended format only when the limits of the original format are exceeded.

Improved compression

WinZip 9.0 supports the "enhanced deflate" compression method. This compression method provides greater compression for many types of files and reduces the size of your Zip files, saving you data transmission time and valuable disk space.

Note: versions of WinZip prior to WinZip 8.1 will not be able to extract files compressed with this new method.

Other Changes in WinZip 9.0

• In addition to the new AES encryption technology, WinZip 9.0 provides a number of usability enhancements that make it easier for you to use encryption. For example, you can now easily encrypt the files that are already in a Zip file; previously, files could be encrypted only while they were being added to the Zip file.

• WinZip 9.0 makes it easier than ever for you to find the WinZip information you need by presenting help information using the newer Microsoft "HTML Help" facility. HTML help has a more attractive appearance and includes many usability improvements.

• WinZip 9.0 gives you easier access to your most important file locations in many WinZip Classic dialogs. Key dialogs such as New Archive, Open Archive, Add, and Extract contain "places bars" when running under Windows versions that support them. The places bar provides quick access to your top-level locations, usually My Computer, My Network (or Network Places), My Documents, Recent Documents (or History), and the Desktop.

• WinZip 9.0 lets you quickly find out what is in your Zip files. In My Computer and Windows Explorer, the tooltip that is displayed when you position the mouse pointer over a Zip file now contains information about the contents of your archives by listing up to 25 of the files and folders in the archive.

• When installed under Windows XP, WinZip 9.0 installs and registers for all users. This change makes it easier to install WinZip in business or home environments where more than one person uses a computer.

• WinZip 9.0 contains a number of changes to improve performance and efficiency:

  • The "Use for removable media only" option for the working folder (in the Folders tab of the Configuration dialog) is now set by default. This results in faster Zip file creation in most cases.

  • By default, WinZip no longer automatically displays comments when opening Zip files that contain comments.

  • In Windows XP network environments, the performance of WinZip's Windows Explorer extensions has been improved.

  • Several changes have been made to improve performance when extracting files from archives.

• WinZip 9.0's Classic interface has been improved:
  • The Extract dialog has been redesigned to display more folders in the folder tree view and to provide more space for typing folder names.

  • Placing the mouse pointer over a truncated file name (one that won't fit in the available space) displays a tooltip showing the complete file name.

  • Because it is an action rather than a setting, the option to "Restore all caution messages" in the Miscellaneous tab of the Configuration dialog has been changed from a checkbox to a pushbutton.

  • The main WinZip window now contains a watermark when used under Windows XP with an XP-style theme.

• WinZip 9.0 no longer triggers false warnings in certain security tools that search for programs that use the "zlib" compression library. zlib is not a WinZip component.

A list of features introduced in earlier versions of WinZip is available from the WinZip web site at http://www.winzip.com/version.htm.