[dada78641]

> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch.

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

[stereo]

When they rewrite it, I’m afraid we’ll get an iPad-esque nerfed and incomplete monstrosity, like we have with the Home or Settings apps.

[aikinai]

Exactly my thought. When they replace Finder, it’ll almost certainly be with a port of the useless iPad Files app.

Apple unfortunately isn’t in the business of making powerful, efficient (user-facing) software anymore.

[meindnoch]

Based on how well the System Preferences → Settings rewrite went: please don't.

[esprehn]

They did apparently rewrite it in Cocoa back in ~2008. Although that was 16 years ago so I'm sure it's accumulated a fair bit of tech debt since then.

[DEADMINCE]

>The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing

Say what you will about Windows, but the Explore file manager has always been pretty rock solid.

[al_borland]

I will say, network drives feel local on Windows. On macOS they feel like network drives. I think I’d say the same about external drives. I stopped using them, because I got sick of waiting for them to spin up anytime Finder had to do some work.

[seabird]

Up until 7, and even afterward in some areas, Windows got things right from an interface standpoint. People seem to forgot that Microsoft dumped large amounts of time and money into figuring out how people use computers and developed their desktop environment accordingly. I've used Windows, macOS, and more Linux DEs than I care to admit. The only thing that tops the Windows DE is KDE, which isn't a massive departure from Windows. macOS has legacy as an excuse, but I don't know what can be said about the various Linux DEs that don't Work Right for the sake of spiting ideas that do.

Windows 11 has pretty severely fucked up Explorer. Named directories can't have their path copied (I think 10 did this bullshit, too). The context menu getting insane whitespace, missing options, and having things dynamically load into it is a travesty. It is heartbreaking that mobile-inspired trash is ultimately going to be way you're forced to interact with a computer.

People let their distaste for somebody's bad behavior and/or old things stop them from admitting that we're in a pretty severe backward slide.

[nottorp]

Hmm. Wasn't it completely unreliable for moving around large numbers of files at the same time? Like if file #243 of 400 failed for some reason, you could actually lose data?

I don't know any more because I use Total Commander on Windows...

[robertoandred]

Explorer can’t even sort folders by size…