Comment 39 for bug 15495

I've asked a few non-technical users (mostly Windows users), all were confused by the term "compress". They can grasp the "extract" idea, but unless you're technical or learned to used "zip" at a time were space was dear (floppies, small hard drives) you'll have no idea what compression can mean on a computer. People I asked had ideas of physically compressing stuff, like hydraulic presses and the stuff, and it never related to any "space-saving" idea, even less on anything that could make sense in a computer.

One also has to note that zip has long been supplanted by RAR on the Windows side (other OS users never really favored zip, which has bad compression ratio). RAR labels the files it produces as _archives_ , not any other term.

There's also self-extracting archives on the Windows side, they end by .exe and are called self-extracting _archives_

So my guess is we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot in order to appease a small fraction of our userbase. There might be a better word than archives, but up now that's the only descriptive name people are used to, including on Windows (discarding the ones that only know the files by their extensions in Windows, which we can't do much about, since zip isn't really used any more on the Internet, and RAR, like zip, doesn't mean much for people that don't know those extensions). As for "compress", it's far more confusing (you're focusing on the not-so-simple compression process, while for archives people can far more easily grasp the idea that some files are grouped inside a "wrapping"). Also, when people extract a file, they can clearly see the idea that some files are inside another one - have fun explaining the idea that the same files were also "compressed" ;)