The status bar fiasco and viewing sizes in Explorer

Sometimes, I'm really appalled at the current state of Windows Explorer. How can a single app degrade so much? Just how could they mess up in a single app so much? I'm talking about the lack of a functional and useful status bar in Explorer on Windows 7. The status bar, like the standard toolbar debuted in Windows 95. It showed the total number of items in a directory or drive, and the total size occupied all the items in a folder (minus the size of subfolders) when browsing folders. This info was most useful when working with any file type and was reported nearly instantaneously, that is, Explorer didn't have any performance issues while showing the total size minus the subfolders. The status bar also showed the free disk space when the folders pane was on. This was another piece of extremely useful information (and it updated upon every refresh like the size), especially when an application was writing large amounts of data to disk. In Windows 9x, the info the status bar displayed, especially the size didn't appear every time but Windows XP onwards, the status bar got totally reliable.

One fine day, Windows Vista came along and along came the horrible Explorer, that I feel they forgot to finish it (and the code got lost perhaps during the reset, no lol just kidding). The Status bar no longer showed the total space at one glance used by items in a folder when displaying a folder's contents. Users had to select files to see their size, what's more, the Vista Explorer's status bar has a horrible bug that persists as of this writing, yes, even in Windows Vista Service Pack 2. It incorrectly calculates file size and misreports it if the file is selected and the view is refreshed and the same file is reselected. It is a broken and partially implemented "feature". Vista also comes with a details pane, which btw is much nicer, more useful and also allows showing and editing metadata. The details pane is supposed to the status bar replacement but it doesn't report free disk space. What a half-done piece of work! Plus, a bonus horrid experience is that selecting more than 15 files makes the details pane force the user to click on a "Show more details" link to see the total size and other date-related details. Select or deselect one file and repeat the whole thing all over again. What a horrible user experience!
 
Apparently, the shell team wasn't done yet which is why they chose Windows 7 to ruin the situation even further. In Windows 7, the status bar does not show the size of any selected item, nor the free disk space. It is now a useless deprecated UI element that only redundantly shows the total number of items. When no items are selected in a folder, neither the details pane nor the status bar show the total size of files in the folder. When 15+ items are selected, the "Show more details" craptastic non-sense persists. (Microsoft's explanation via email when I asked about this issue was "calculating size is a complex operation which is CPU and I/O intensive!" and with libraries coming into the picture, Microsoft can't implement this correctly. WTF!?) Suddenly, for Microsoft, the total size without selecting a file and without the subfolders is a shallow computation that they decide is of no value to the user.

Why has Microsoft made viewing the total size such a pain in the a**? Are they forcing us to use the details view which annoyingly shows sizes in KBs instead of a meaningful MB or GB reporting? Do they want us to use the folder tooltip to view the total folder size? The folder tooltip doesn't show the size quickly enough for large folders, so that isn't a reliable way. The Properties dialog shows the size but again that isn't quickly accessible from the toolbar, but lies one more click inside the Organize menu or context menu . Plus, who the hell wants to view Properties every time he is changing his selection when working with files? Additionally, Alt+Enter is broken in the left pane of Explorer and simply plays the default beep sound. And with IColumnProvider gone, viewing folder sizes in a column in details view is impossible. Viewing sizes is now a two-or-more-clicks operation everywhere.
 
The performance reason is non-sense and for what its worth, I'd rather have it with the supposed performance hit. For virtual views like libraries or search, they need not implement the show-size-without-selection feature at all, neither was it implemented in Windows XP's search. And what is the explanation for removing universal free disk space reporting? Is that computationally intensive too for today's CPUs? That is, as one angry commenter in Microsoft's forums said, like removing the clock from the taskbar because you have got a nice analog clock as a gadget.

A side effect of deprecating the status bar is that it is no longer possible to accurately know how much space you can free up by emptying the Recycle Bin items if it contains folders. As long as only files are selected, file sizes are shown in the status bar details pane. However, selecting a single folder along with any number of files makes Explorer stop displaying sizes; the Properties menu item is broken as well when multiple items are selected in the Recycle Bin so it is impossible to know the size of your selected items before you delete them. Plus, the 15+ files nonsense continues.
 
Is there no one complaining or noticing this seemingly small but practically huge regression? Apparently, there are quite a number of complaints, with some threatening to go back to Windows XP for this simple but important "feature", but they're being shown the "This behavior is by design" billboard.

Status bar rants:
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/20172-free-remaining-space-status-bar.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/23504-windows-explorer-status-bar-does-not-show-file-size.html
http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-desktop-customization/19337-folder-details-explorer-status-bar.html
http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/8559-status-bar-does-not-show-total-folder-size.html
http://serverfault.com/questions/8905/windows7-no-disk-usage-in-status-bar
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7files/thread/ec4c13d4-da59-4b53-80c2-1e09882921d8
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/1cbc3578-c8a8-42a7-a18e-308c0a63f977
http://superuser.com/questions/19232/is-there-a-way-for-windows-7-to-show-remaining-disk-space-in-the-status-bar
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproui/thread/cb896374-07ff-448d-ac63-0e9a31efff0d
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/79832-windows-explorer-status-bar.html

Recycle Bin status bar issue:
http://www.computerforum.com/164120-windows-7-recycle-bin-how-do-you-see-total-size.html
http://forum.soft32.com/windows/Size-recycle-bin-content-ftopict365894.html
http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/8277-display-total-size-items-recycle-bin.html

... and so on but does anyone at Microsoft care? Apparently not because it's been this way since the Windows Vista betas.

Once again, Classic Shell's Classic Explorer shell extension fixes this!! It even fixes Windows Vista's own buggy implementation which miscalculates the file size in certain cases.


Update: This looks like a cat-and-mouse game. Windows 8 Explorer uses a non-standard status bar control in Explorer and eliminates most of the functionality so now not even Classic Shell can fix it. I guess Microsoft weren't happy with third parties fixing Explorer.

The navigation 'pain' in Windows 7

Windows XP introduced a very handy feature in Windows Explorer called "Simple Folder View". Basically, it allows you to click just once in the navigation/left pane of Explorer to expand the folder you want to work with, while you can keep the single-click-for-everything-else feature turned off. What's more, if you click on another folder, it automatically collapses the earlier one and expands the new folder. As a result, you won't end up with lots of folder trees to collapse manually if you are working with lots of folders and end up scrolling less vertically. But for no apparent reason (Microsoft's stupid telemetry at work?), they've removed this nice behavior from Windows Vista and Windows 7. How many times do I have to curse them for getting rid of stuff for no reason? Just what was the harm in keeping this untouched especially if it could be turned on/off from Folder options? I smell lazy shell programmers who didn't bother to update the code for the updated shell.

As a bonus annoyance, Windows 7 Explorer has an extremely annoying bug wherein the navigation pane scrolls upwards when a folder is expanded or collapsed (happens usually when using the keyboard) instead of adjusting the view to show the expanded folder's subfolders or making sure at least the collapsed folder remains in view.

Few more bonus annoyances of the left pane of Explorer include not supporting single click to rename, not giving us a "Folders" button (like XP) to toggle the navigation pane like they have for the "Preview pane" (like Windows 7), not showing a horizontal scrollbar when items extend beyond the split adjustor (instead showing a tooltip only upon hover!), getting rid of the intuitive automatic scrolling introduced in Windows Vista, playing a dumb default sound (ding) for Alt+Enter instead of bring up Properties and making the thickness of the vertical split view adjustor so thin that it becomes very difficult to drag it. Kudos to the Windows shell team for doing this!

Quite a number of people (some since Vista) seem to be asking about Simple Folder View but all replies are in vain. Some others seem to be pissed off about the missing horizontal scrollbar or automatic Vista-like scrolling in the navigation pain pane.

A million thanks to Classic Shell once again which fixes all of the navigation pane bugs and usability issues.

16 bit apps get degraded treatment even in 32-bit Windows 7

The other day I migrated one of my laptops from Windows XP to Windows 7 and copied over the Microsoft Entertainment Pack games which I've always enjoyed playing. Guess what! The horrible Explorer wouldn't show icons for ANY of the 16-bit executables but instead shows a generic program icon! First, I thought I must have installed 64-bit Windows 7 by mistake but no this has got nothing to do with 32-bit or 64-bit. At a time when I used Windows XP Professional x64 edition, Explorer had no problems showing 16-bit icons. A little searching brought me to this article by Raymond Chen which confirms my fear - the "feature" was dropped in Windows Vista apparently because the code was obsolete and not so secure. 32-bit or 64-bit processes don't extract icons from 16 bit resources any more. But why does the shell team not understand that this decision degrades the user experience and just because they haven't come across anyone using 16-bit software today doesn't mean people don't. Instead of making the same old maintenance cost vs time vs value argument, why not prevent the experience from degrading? The current behavior essentially makes all Win16 apps look like MS-DOS apps. Sheesh!

Plus, the new taskbar ensures that users using 16-bit applications continue to have a degraded user experience. If a 16-bit program is pinned to the taskbar, it appears as a separate button (two instances) when launched/running. Looks like the Live Messenger 2009 team influenced this.

This issue has been discussed here on MSDN. I e-mailed Raymond Chen and he replied that he would add my request to the other requests being made of the user interface team so they can prioritize it appropriately. Which means that a feature that worked in previous Windows versions won't be fixed right away with a higher priority or may never be fixed (as MS crawls towards 64-bit).

Why Windows Explorer sucks in Windows 7: Obsession with hiding things

The left pane of Windows Explorer has fugly triangular arrows replacing the simple plus and minus signs. Why are they there in the first place, let's remind ourselves of that first. They are there to indicate that there are subfolders inside a certain folder. But why is the behavior in Windows 7 extremely annoying? At the first opportunity it gets (the moment the mouse pointer leaves the navigation pane), the arrows disappear. Now imagine if I have to drag something from the right pane into some folder in the left pane. How am I assured that the folder I am dragging to has a subfolder? Why can't the damn arrows in the left pane be set to always show? Why do they disappear when dragging and dropping if the user clicks in the right pane before starting to drag to the left pane?

And while we're on the subject, why not get rid of arrows and bring back the + and - signs? The developer division did that in Visual Studio 2010 when lots of developers complained. No one's complaining about this one, people are still drunk with the Windows 7 kool-aid. Oh well, Windows XP FTW!

And btw this annoyance also applies to Windows 7's evil cousin and is also mentioned on the excellent Windows 7 Taskforce created by Long Zheng.

Fortunately, a fastastic open source shell extension called Classic Shell fixes this problem in Windows 7 and in Windows Vista!!

 

Update: Despite Classic Shell, Windows Explorer still needs a lot of fixing in Windows 7 and Windows 8. See the more up-to-date post for Windows 8 for a list of things that need fixing and send your feedback to Microsoft to fix these.