(1)The use of standard UTF-8 charset means the non-shortest UTF-8 form of BMP character is no longer accepted. -A desirable change, see http://ccc.sfbay.sun.com/4486841 for details. (2)Also the supplementary characters in file names and comments are now output/encoded in standard 4-byte UTF-8 form. Jar tool and java.util.jar/zip package in earlier releases do not understand the 4-byte form. -It is the "incompatibility" (forward compatibility) that we can't avoid if we want to update to the latest UTF-8 standard and make the Java Jar/Zip file exchangeable with other standards-compliant Zip implementations. The price we have to pay. -The standard UTF-8 charset does accept pair of 3-byte surrogates when decoding, so we are backward-compatible -A modified-UTF-8 charset implementation can be added into our java.nio.charset repository should such request/escalation come in (in which case you can use the modified-UTF-8 and the proposed APIs to generate "old-style-zip-jar" file).