Windows Explorer Annoyances – Part 1
Windows Explorer is one of the Windows applications I spent most time in. At work, we have a large collection of network drives, local drives and large folder structures. We still use Windows XP there. I get along with Windows Explorer in XP just fine. The only thing I really miss in XP (because the large amount of folders I have to move between constantly) is tabs in Windows Explorer. Luckily, there are 3rd party tools for that, like the QTTabBar extension (http://qttabbar.wikidot.com/) or the xplorer2 replacement (http://www.zabkat.com/).
But in Vista and Windows 7 the Explorer is ‘upgraded’. Now I love progress, especially in Windows Explorer, since I use that a lot, so anything that gets my work done quicker gets my blessing. And to be fair, a lot is indeed better (like the address bar) in Vista an 7. But that are some things that nag me so much, I just have to write about it! I have lots of usability issues with Windows Explorer in Windows 7, so this post is just the first of a series about it.
First up: The out-of-sync folder (tree) view and folder content area. You can browse through folders using a tree view in the navigation pane on the left. The right pane shows the content of the folder. If a folder contains sub-folders, you can also enter those by double-clicking them in the content area. In XP, this moved the selected folder in the tree view also. So left and right sides always matched each other. In Windows 7, this is not the case (by default). If you
enter a subfolder by double-clicking in the content area, the folder that is selected in the tree view remains as is, making the left and right panes out of sync. This is confusing and I really don’t see the point of this behavior. But worse, since the effect of which folder is selected is quite subtle, it is easy to delete a wrong folder. Look at the example on the right, image you have a lot of apps open, are browsing through all kind of folders and doing multitasking-like things. You quickly switch back to Windows Explorer, press delete to delete the folder you just browsed to. Which folder is going to be deleted? Hard to see if you just look at the highlighted folders. I accidently removed the wrong folder twice already in the few months I am using Windows 7, never had that in years of XP usage.
Luckily you can smack some common sense into explorer by enabling the old behavior: Tools > Folder Options > Navigation pane > Automatically expand to current folder.
Related to this is another problem: In XP, you start Windows Explorer (I usually do this by the Windows-E shortcut) and can immediately start browsing to the folder you need by using the cursor keys. Up/down moves up/down in the tree, right/left expands and collapse a node in the tree. A quick and convenient method if you have to browse folders a lot. In Windows 7, this no longer works. Look at this, a screenshot of a freshly started Explorer, nothing touched yet:
Which item has focus and where will focus move when you press cursor down? The current focused item can only be “Computer”, right? It’s the only thing that is highlighted. But get this: press down and focus is placed on the Removable Storage drives and both drive E: and F: become selected! Weird huh?
This is annoying because you cannot start to move to the directory you want immediately. You must first press shift-tab to return focus to the navigation pane, then you can start to traverse the tree to the folder you were looking for. When doing this, you notice another problem: traversing the tree does not update the content pane like it did in XP. You have to press space or enter before that right pane gets updated to show the content of the selected folder. In XP, updates where hold off when you quickly moved through the tree (preventing system slowdown) and the content area immediately updated when you stopped traversing the tree. Quick, smart and convenient.
Regardless of what you think of the other ‘improvements’ like libraries, favorites, etc (I will talk about that in a next article), Windows Explorer clearly has some usability issues here and is a step down from the version in XP. For the power user, things just constantly requires more clicks or key presses which is more than a little annoying. To me, this is going backward, not forward.
I do hope someone from Microsoft is listening!
