

This move was a success, and Compact Pro subsequently fell out of use. Several other Mac compression utilities appeared and disappeared during the 1990s, but none became a real threat to StuffIt's dominance. The only ones to see any widespread use were special-purpose "disk expanders" like DiskDoubler and SuperDisk!, which served a different niche. Apparently as a side-effect, StuffIt once again saw few upgrades. The file format changed in a number of major revisions, leading to incompatible updates. PC-based formats long surpassed the original StuffIt format in terms of compression, notably newer systems like RAR and 7z.


These had little impact on the Mac market, as most of these never appeared in an easy-to-use program on the Mac. With the introduction of Mac OS X, newer Mac software lost their forks and no longer needed anything except the built-in Unix utilities like gzip and tar. Numerous programs "wrapping" these utilities were distributed, and since these files could be opened on any machine, they were considerably more practical than StuffIt in an era when most data is cross-platform. With the release of OS X Public Beta, Aladdin Systems released StuffIt 6.0 which runs under OS X.Īlthough it was late to market, Aladdin Systems introduced the completely new StuffIt X format in September 2002 with StuffIt Deluxe 7.0 for Macintosh. It was designed to be extendable, support more compression methods, support long file names, and support Unix and Windows file attributes. StuffIt X improves over the original StuffIt format and its descendants by adding multiple compression algorithms such as PPM, and BWT to LZW-type compression.
