Let me start by stating that Norton Commander for DOS was brilliant. Explorer for Windows 3, not so much. Windows 95 and upwards improved a little on the basic concept, but it seems that Explorer peaked in XP, because now it's not only declining in usability as well as stability, but actually free falling at high speed past their earlier versions, thus managing to render Vista completely useless.
Everybody knows about this first gripe, but let's cross it off the list to begin with.
What on earth were they thinking, when they decided that Explorer should repeatedly and stubbornly assume that every folder on every hard drive must surely be filled with media files that I will want to tag or rate in some addlebrained manner. Easily fixed, yes? Just change view once and apply it to every folder. But no, of course that doesn't work, because that would be too easy. Not only that, but somehow the columns apply even in tiled views. Explorer is out to hurt us.
Have you noticed how sometimes, it's impossible to delete an entire directory structure? Explorer returns with an Access Denied, and you think to yourself, maybe one of the files in there is locked by an application. So you drill down and delete each child directory and their individual files manually, working your way up. At the end, you find the joke was on you - everything was perfectly possible to delete, and no files were locked. You deleted the whole thing, and you're left wondering why Explorer was somehow unable to.
There should really be a switch in Windows. Two modes, selectable from somewhere in the Control Panel. What I want is a way to turn off The Stupid™. Oh please please let me select Advanced Mode, a mode where there is no ridiculous hand holding such as this next dialog, which some might claim to be an improvement over the one found in XP. Guess what - I beg to differ.
If anything, this has just made it that much more difficult to copy files, because now I have to read all that text every time before I can figure out which option is which. More annoyingly, why is the "All" choice suddenly minimized into that check box at the bottom of such a humongous dialog? Let me just press A and be done with it!
While we're on the topic of file moving, why is it that not only is Explorer still unable to properly calculate the time remaining for the operation to be completed, but now it takes that much longer to think it over, or "prepare" as it were, before even beginning to do any actual work. It boggles the mind.
This next dialog is Explorer related, although it doesn't actually display in Explorer itself.
Talk about a downward step in GUI design. This dialog pops up when disconnecting a USB memory or similar. In XP it was just an informative, non intrusive bubble above the system tray, but now it's a full blown dialog, forcing us to dismiss it with a pointless click on a useless OK button in a dialog presenting information I only slightly care about. Barf.
Lastly, the real reason Vista's so called Explorer drives me up the walls. It doesn't synchronize the tree view and the file view properly. When selecting a folder in the tree view, one would expect the file view to display that folder's contents. This still works acceptably for mousers, unless you're used to clicking the little plus and minus icons next to the folders like I am, but apparently there are no keyboard cowboys at MS, because it's horribly broken for those of us, real devs that is, who tend to avoid the mouse when doing any real work. Try stepping around the tree view using the cursor keys, and nothing - NOTHING - happens. You have to press Enter for the folders to sync. Guess where that leaves Vista? BALEETED!
Oh, and it seems Explorer isn't fixed in Windows 7 either. For some mysterious reason MS has apparently and purposely chosen to drive their customers away. Suppose I'll have to start using Linux in earnest then.
(Screens with permission from Martin Rubli's Tech Blog.)
