Nowadays it matters if you use a compression algorithm that can utilize multiple cores for packing/unpacking larger data. For a multiple GB archive that can be the difference between "I'll grab a coffee until this is ready" or "I'll go for lunch and hope it is done when I come back"
I personally prefer bzip2 - but it needs to be packed with pbzip, not the regular bzip to generate archives that can be extracted on multiple cores. Not a good option if you have to think about Windows users, though.