I know, it’s really poor form to jump around and gleefully snicker, “I told you so,” but sometimes I can’t resist.

I pointed out a few months back that the new file dialogs in GNOME 2.6 were poorly designed. The exclusion of a text box from the “Open” dialog, among other things, reflects a truly deep ignorance of how users actually use GNOME — as opposed to how GNOME‘s developers believe users should use GNOME. (I originally posted to FootNotes, where people really flamed me for my heresy.)

Well, it looks like I’m not the only one who’s less than enthusiastic about having the GNOME developers play dictator with the user interfaces we’ve grown accustomed to. A review of Fedora Core 2 on Linux.com diverges for an entire paragraph (with requisite screenshot) about how stupid the “Open” dialog box is. Nick Petreley writes in a Computerworld opinion piece, “I can only assume that the GNOME developers decided to make Nautilus a worse Windows than Windows. I toast their rousing success.”

It’s time to come back to the real world: features are great, but not when they impose an unnecessary learning curve on the average user. Even I find this “new” interface too much hassle for the benefits, and I am very used to keyboard shortcuts for everything.

I never saw justification for another total revamp of the dialog boxes; all they needed was to add the “Locations” list to the side of the 2.4 dialogs, and we’d be happy. Instead, we are pissed.

So I, too, would like to raise a bottle of beer to the failure of the GNOME team to produce a usable interface. Chin chin, boys.

Update: I suppose I should check Planet Twisted before delivering a rant, just to make sure Glyph hasn’t already ranted on the same topic, but with far more eloquence and tact than I could’ve hoped for. Oh well. Like I said, flame away.