[Nautilus-list] performance and usability

[James Mitchell Allmond <gte203h prism gatech edu>]

I hate to be negative but Nautilus is very unusable from a user point of
view. Even though today's file browsers have to have all the bells and
whistles, it should not be at the expense of performance. As of now
nautilus performs so god awful in terms of general speed and
responsiveness, that's it's unusable and unacceptable as a day to day
file browser. When a user is browsing their files, they need and demand
quick, snappy, and responsive actions by the file browser. I find it
ridiculous that galeon can load complex websites over the internet with
many images included faster than nautilus can display a small group of
files in a directory on my local hard disk. No, I do not have any
problems with nautilus that are specific to my system. Another comment
I'd like to make is related to fluid navigation. As of now, nautilus is
about as fluid as solid iron when it comes to navigation. I can't even
do something as simple as selecting my cdrom or floppy drive from the
nautilus window. Another note I'd like to make is that nautilus is not a
web browser and nor should it ever attempt to become one. If a user
wants to browse the internet, they'll use galeon or mozilla. If a user
is browsing html files on their computer, the focus of the user with
respect to a file browser is to browse the files and their properties.
If they wish to view it as a webpage, use a web browser or have nautilus
open it up into the gnome default web browser. Nautilus needs to be more
focused on it's goals. Nautilus isn't and shouldn't attempt to be the
solution to all problems. In doing so, it's become solution to nothing.
Once again, I hate to be negative but it's the truth.  The motto for
nautilus development should be, "simple, elegant, focused, but
productively useful" not "looks good, cool and slow effects in software
that produce lots of overhead, 50 billion features that go outside the
true purpose of a file browser."