Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel & Andy Hertzfeld in 1999. Nautilus was first released in 2001 and development has continued ever since. The following is a brief timeline of its development history:
Version 1.0 was released on March 13, 2001, and incorporated into GNOME 1.4.
Version 2.4 switched the desktop folder to ~/Desktop to be compliant with freedesktop.org standards.
In the version included with GNOME 2.6, Nautilus switched to a spatial interface. Several Linux distributions have made "browser" mode the default. The "classic" interface is still available:
* By using the "--browser" switch when started by a command via a launcher or shell.
GNOME 2.14 introduced a version of Nautilus with improved searching, integrated optional Beagle support and the ability to save searches as virtual folders.
With the release of GNOME 2.22, Nautilus was ported to the newly introduced GVfs, the replacement virtual file system for the aging GnomeVFS.
The 2.32 release introduced a dialog for handling conflicts when performing copy or move operations, transparency icon effect when cutting files into folder and enhanced the Wastebucket with Restore files. Besides, this is the last version that is based on GTK2 before the move to GNOME 3.0 with GTK3. Nautilus 2.x was forked to Caja, as well as MATE Desktop from Gnome 2.x after Gnome 3.0. Today both Mate and Caja are based on GTK3.
GNOME 3.0 completely revamped the UX of Nautilus with focus on sidebar and icons. Additionally, the Connect to Server dialog is also enhanced. Nautilus was ported to GTK3.
Version 3.4 added Undo functionality.
Version 3.6 introduced a revamped UI design, symbolic sidebar icon, new search feature, removal of many features such as setting window background, emblems, split pane mode, spatial mode, scripts, compact view mode and tree view. Nautilus' application name was renamed to Files, Though it is still called Nautilus internally in some distributions. These major changes led to a lot of criticism, and various vendors such as Linux Mint decided to fork version 3.4.
Version 3.8 included a new option to view files and folders as a tree, a new Connect to Server item in the sidebar and incremental loading of search results.
Version 3.10 introduced a slightly revamped UI design in which titlebars and toolbars were merged into a single element called header bars.
Version 3.18 introduced integration with Google Drive and GOA settings.
Features
Bookmarks, window backgrounds, notes, and add-on scripts are all implemented, and the user has the choice between icon, list, or compact list views. In browser mode, Nautilus keeps a history of visited folders, similar to web browsers, permitting quick revisiting of folders. Nautilus can display previews of files in their icons, be they text files, images, sound or video files via thumbnailers such as Totem. Audio files are previewed when the pointer is hovering over them. In earlier versions, Nautilus included original vectorized icons designed by Susan Kare.
GNOME Files version 3.22 adds native, integrated file compression and decompression. By default, handling of archive files was handed off to File Roller. Users now benefit from a progress bar, undo support, and an archive creation wizard. The new "extract on open" behavior, which automatically extracts an archive file by double clicking it, can be disabled in the preferences.
MIME types
s are standardized by the IANA, then the freedesktop.org project takes care that the implementation works across all free software desktops. shared-mime-info is the provided library. At this time, at least GNOME, KDE, Xfce and ROX use this database.
