Call for vote: Nautilus use Browser view for fedora 11

[Callum Lerwick]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 14:17 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
> But the pro-change people produced pretty good arguments for change:
>   1. both Windows and MacOS (between them they cover something like 95%
>      of computer users) use browser mode. These companies have done
>      extensive UI studies which we can't afford.

Mind you from 1983 to 2001, Classic MacOS, and the Lisa before it,
pretty much defined "spacial" mode. Quite a few usability studies were
done in this era...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

OSX switched away only because of its NextStep roots, which was a
greatly differing GUI design to begin with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Columns

Interestingly, Windows 95 started off with a kind of half-assed spacial
mode as default, and subsequently moved to browser mode as Internet
Explorer dug its claws deep into the core of the operating system.

Here's what a usability study looks like:

http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm

It would be interesting to know if later Windows moved away from spacial
for any reason other than "We're going to force everyone to use Internet
Explorer". (or "People got confused because we didn't properly implement
spacial in the first place")

Basic fact: Hierarchy quickly overwhelms puny human minds, no matter how
well it is presented. Hierarchy does not scale. The best option is to
keep things flat to begin with. We need to move to an attribute ("tag")
search based system. Think Google.
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