The official history of 7-Zip documents decades of refinements:
Expanded support for macOS formats, including archives using the LZFSE compression method. Recent Security Context
: The format was built to handle massive archives, supporting files up to 16,000,000,000 GB (16 exbibytes). Key Version Milestones
: In many benchmarks, 7z can compress files 30–70% better than the standard ZIP format.
7-Zip was first released in by Russian developer Igor Pavlov . The project was designed as a high-compression alternative to established formats like ZIP and RAR. The core of its efficiency lies in the LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm) and LZMA2 compression methods, which often achieve significantly smaller file sizes than standard ZIP files. Evolution of the 7z Format