Open ZIP File

ZIP is a format and at the same time it is the extension of the files that follow ZIP format.

The ZIP file format compresses large files or large numbers of files for easy sharing and manipulation. The ZIP compression format does lossless compression, that is, when you decompress, you get your original file again.

The ZIP format also supports very large file segmentation for easy download by users. Its most common use is for attachments via email or exchange of groups of files by instant messaging services such as WhatsApp or Telegram.

The ZIP compression format uses several compression methods ranging from the old 'Shrink' method to encrypted compression methods such as AE-x. Some of these methods are based on other no-less-known formats such as MP3 and JPEG.

Windows natively has a zip/unzip software, like Linux, however, the older versions of these operating systems do not have it and you need to download and install a suitable application for this purpose.

There are countless softwares to work with the ZIP format, below are the most popular ones:

7-ZIP
WinZIP
WinRAR

It is important to note that the compression process applies only to files that can be compressed, such as office files, plain text and some types of vectorized images, however, most multimedia files must have already gone through a compression algorithm and ZIP programs won't do much beyond original compression.