A few months back we’ve reported Google Chrome no longer allows users to automatically open downloaded ZIP files as the “Always open files of this type ” option has been grayed out in the file’s right-click menu. After receiving reports and feedback from users, Google recognized this as a regression for a change introduced in Chrome 73, the bug should be fixed and they’ll reactivate the option soon to allow users to auto-open downloaded ZIP and RAR files again.
Here is what happened?
Around April 2019, Chrome users started complaining they can’t able to select the option in Chrome browser download bar to auto-open ZIP files (this is the case with RAR files also).
“It may be a recent change in Chrome specifically not wanting to automatically open.ZIp files, but this is very inconvenient for me. I open hundreds of these files a week while multi-tasking” a user says in the Chrome help forum.
This gave the users the impression that Google has intentionally made this change to the Chrome browser, which is not as we now know as Microsoft Edge developer Eric Lawrance found the change that caused this regression and he created a patch to fix the problem.
Permit auto-open of ZIP and RAR files In Chrome 73, a regression was introduced that acccidentally blocked users from choosing to auto-open files with .ZIP and .RAR extensions. This CL resolves the problem by explicitly copying the |auto_open_hint| from the |default_file_type| to each of the affected file types.
As you should expect, the change first lands in Chromium, further it gets into Chrome Canary, dev, beta and stable channels.
UPDATE November 28, 2019: The change is now landed in Chrome Canary 80.0.3979.0.
