Comment 16 for bug 14838

Mark, when you say "most navigation is with the intent to shift focus to the new
directory", you are already implying this intend with the use of the word
"navigation". The important mistake here is, that most file managment does _not_
equal navigation. The spatial paradigm allows you to work a lot more with your
folders than the navigator paradigm and this change essentially breaks it.
Double clicking a folder in a spatial context is not meant to be a navigational
action but a file managment action, akin to double clicking a document. Most of
the time I'm working with a base folder and constantly open sub folders
temporarily, I _never_ want the base folder to close in this case. Notice that
the current change also totally reverts the behavior of clicking on documents
and folders. This is very very bad.

The proper way to improve navigation in a spatial context isn't to break its
behavior, but to introduce alternative routes to directly jump to the required
location. One such alternative is the Ctrl+L dialog, which is very convenient if
you know the path. A good and usually agreed-upon GUI alternative is to provide
a tree-like list view mode, which would allow you to expand folders and then
directly open the one you want to move to. Mac OS Classic had a view like this
and AFAIK there are plans to add this to Nautilus, once someone gets around to
actually implement it. Here is a screenshot:
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/community/IMAGES/finder_list.gif

This change bothers me a lot, because there is nothing I care more about than
the usability of my working environment. I feel that this change is a big
mistake and carelessly damages the usability which the GNOME projects has
crafted so carefully.