curl shipped by Microsoft

On December 19 2017, Microsoft announced that since insider build 17063 of Windows 10, curl is a default component.

Windows 10/11 bundle curl

All installs of Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 get curl installed by default since then.

The Microsoft provided version is built to use the Schannel TLS backend. Invoking curl -V after the November 22 2023 update shows this on these platforms:

curl 8.4.0 (Windows) libcurl/8.4.0 Schannel WinIDN
Release-Date: 2023-10-11
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: AsynchDNS HSTS HTTPS-proxy IDN IPv6 Kerberos Largefile NTLM SPNEGO SSL SSPI threadsafe Unicode UnixSockets

Omissions

The build Microsoft ships omits several good features:

• it has no compression support, making --compressed fail
• it has no Public Suffic List (PSL) support, making it impossible to prevent "super cookies"
• it does not support HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
• it only supports a limited set of protocols (no SCP, SFTP, etc)

Separate

The curl tool shipped with Windows is built by and handled by Microsoft. It is a separate build that will have different features and capabilities enabled and disabled compared to the Windows builds offered by the curl project. They do however build curl from the same source code. If you have problems with their curl version, report that to them.

You can probably assume that the curl packages from Microsoft will always lag behind the versions provided by the curl project itself.

A Powershell alias

The curl tool comes installed in addition to the dreaded curl alias that plagues Powershell users since it is an alias that runs the invoke-webrequest command and therefore isn't acting much like curl at all.

A work-around is to invoke curl as "curl.exe" to prevent powershell from treating it as an alias.