B1 Free Archiver

I do not understand the power of B1 archives. They are neither the fastest, nor the most compressive. The program can make 6 types of archives. ZIP, 7Z, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2 and B1. I couldn't integrate it with the explorer on "Windows 8.1" x64. The box in its options didn't change when I clicked on it. I played with it for a while, then decided to stick with "Haozip" mostly. Although, I'm always looking for something new in this industry.

Works well with Chinese passwords. Many of the other archive programs I tried did not.

I found B1 super helpful for creating password-protected zip-files on my mac. I'm not in the mood of learning this terminal-stuff and also not willing to spend many $... it just works for me very fine! Thanks

I was tersing B1 Free archiver on my Linux (Lubuntu 19.04) and I think it bad because of:

• the included bundleware (with Linux user can't unslect while installing)
• no support of the most of archive types
• ugly and primitive interface
• leak much basic and advanced functionality
• require to install additional files

Tried many of archivers. This archiver for Mac the best of the free.

It's not a bad archiver. It supports many formats, has a nice GUI, and the most important functionality. There is a setup wizard and tutorial that introduces newcomers to how archives in general, and B1 Archiver in particular, work.

While it does have a number of options to change its behaviour, I personally missed more detailed settings, especially when it comes to compression settings for a new archive. The tool can create archives in ZIP and its own B1 format. While for B1 you get at least 5 compression presets, there are no settings at all for ZIP. So it is definitely not the right tool for power users. But what's there seems to work well, including drag & drop, and temporary extraction of files from an archive when opening them – two things other archivers still don't support or get right after many years (such as 7-Zip GUI). Feature-wise, it's definitely a lot better than so many other archivers I tried (particularly on Mac) which make it almost impossible to do anything beyond double-click to extract.

I personally felt that the speed of B1 wasn't the best though. This includes both compression and decompression which weren't as good as with WinRAR or 7-Zip, as well as the GUI, which seemed to become a bit sluggish when a large (1GB) archive was opened (tested on a Core i7 with 32 GB RAM and Windows 7 x64).

If you just need an archiver to extract the odd file, B1 can be a good choice. If you work with archives more regularly and need fine-grained control, look for a more comprehensive tool.