Re: Nautilus bugs and design choices

[Erik Pukinskis <erik pukinskis uconn edu>]

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 16:39, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> What people are used to from windows does (or should) not matter; web
> browsers even less since Nautilus is not a web browser.

I agree that it's counter-productive to let consistency with windows get
in the way with internal consistency in GNOME.  That said...

The reason to have browser-style navigation in a file manager is that
many people treat their disks like the internet.  I don't have a
citation, but I've been told that while programmers tend to keep track
of hierarchies very easily, less technical people view their computing
experience as a linear thing.  They follow a sequence of steps to
accomplish a goal.  Because of this, it's easy for them to grok that in
order to go to where they were a few steps ago, they don't navigate "up"
the tree, but they go back through the steps, like they would in a web
browser.

At least that's my understanding of it. 

Erik Pukinskis