Windows users, Windows Explorer, vs Mac users & the Finder

In My Humble Opinion
1

If you’re (primarily or exclusively) a Windows user, what do you call the environment where you can click directly on files, drag them to other drives or folders, drag them into the recycle bin, and so forth? Do you refer to it as “Windows Explorer”, as Microsoft itself officially does? Do you have a different term you use when talking to other PC users? Or do you not generally call it by anything in particular?

Do you think of it as “a program” or do you think of it as “your computer” itself, or perhaps as “your hard drives” or “your folder (or directory) structure” or something?

Do you tend NOT to interact with it very much, and instead do most things like deleting and renaming and opening files from within an application’s “Open” or “Save” dialog?
…

My friends regard me as enough of a computer geek that they ask me for help.

I’ve noticed when interacting with folks who have come to the Mac from a previous experience in Windows, that they don’t like the Finder. But not for the expected reasons (like not being able to drag a folder to an identically named folder and have it only copy the files not already in the destination folder, or not seeing the file path automatically at the top of each Finder window) – they don’t really compare the Finder to Windows Explorer when they make their complaints; instead they speak of the Finder as if it were a weird program that they find perplexing and don’t understand why they are being instructed to use it. They tend to keep wanting to look for files from within a running program’s Open or Save As dialog box and when advised to switch to the Finder and do a search or to open a folder in the Finder they huff and sigh.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed when interacting with PC users (the ones using Windows, I mean), if I need them to be working with files at the file level, I get blank looks when I tell them to go into Windows Explorer. Well, what I get is actually that they go into INTERNET Explorer and then I tell them “No, Windows Explorer, not the web browser” and that’s when I get the blank looks. And, like the ones who have switched to Mac, if I instead start off telling them to go to (for example) “where your invoice files are”, they open Word and navigate there from within the Open dialog (even if the files are going to be a mixture of PDFs and Excel files).

It’s not that fledgling newbie Mac users don’t do silly clueless things (they do) (“where did you save it?” “Oh, I saved it in Word”) but these PC users I’m referring to aren’t generally newbies, and aside from that the silly clueless things that Mac users do or say to me are different silly clueless things, and they don’t seem to find the Finder offputting or foreign.

2

The folders. The Desktop (although it’s not quite true, but for many users that’s the point they start from and what they call the whole system). The file system. Strictly speaking it’s the graphic depiction of the file system, but I suspect those young coworkers I had who were stunned that I knew what a GUI is wouldn’t even understand what that means*; neither would the majority of users.

The instructions I give to people who need to find a specific file usually begin with “go to your computer’s desktop” (it’s been a while since I last encountered someone who thought that meant the actual desk; those usually understand “the computer’s background, where all the little pictures are”) and continue by “is there a picture of a computer that says ‘my computer’ or something like that?”

  • They asked “what do you have to study, to know that?” “Nothing, you just have to be old. I remember when computers didn’t have pictures except once you were inside a game.”
3

Lifelong Mac user here. I know its called “finder” but I just always call it “desktop”. I’ve got a pretty good handle on how I stack and organize things so rarely do I use the search feature. I do miss Sherlock though from the pre-X OSs ------- I still use my old 520c for some things and wish I had that now and then.

4

I consider the general class of such items to be “file explorers”. Many Linux distros will have a program by that name. (With a 2 drawer filing cabinet as it’s icon.)

I avoid MS-Windows Explorer as much as possible. I much prefer to use ACDsee. (And an old version at that, with a simpler interface.) The way it is setup to interact via the file tree hierarchy is right for me.

My first GUI was with the Xerox Alto. I don’t recall any particular name for the thing you used to drag-and-drop and such. It was just the GUI, AFAIR.

5

I call it “Explorer.” I like it much better than Finder.

To me, using explorer is how work is done and how things are moved around. It pretty much is the computer to me. Applications are not my computer. Applications are what I happen to use to interact with files on my computer. I think that is a very different from how some people see it.

I remember once looking over a co-worker’s shoulder and they were doing significant file operations in the “save as” or “open” dialog. I’m thinking “What the %*&$ are you doing?” I don’t get it.

6

When I bought a PC after using Macs for years I initially called it the “Finder” but quickly abandoned that because file explorer still has yet to “find” anything. The search box is completely useless. “Instant results” my ass; every time I type something in that useless search box the computer appears to start indexing itself right then and there. Even when something is right on the desktop, file explorer just sits there, charging its stupid green bar, and 5-10 minutes later, it fails to come up with what I was looking for.

7

This is true. Windows ability to find files peaked with XP SP2. It’s just gone downhill from there.

8

Windows has changed the way it labels these, and there have been optional ways of getting to the file system, so it seems to me the OP is conflating two very distinct things: simple nomenclature and the actual function of navigation.

In 7 I believe you could choose “Computer” from the start menu, or you could click the file folder icon in the task tray, which doesn’t even have a name. In 10 it’s called “documents.” Probably they’ve done this because they know people confuse “Windows Explorer” with “Internet Explorer.” However, once inside, people know that it’s a file system, regardless of what it’s called. So I don’t see what the issue is.

The people who just resort to saving within an application to move things are probably just people who use computers only for one or two things, and that’s the habit they’ve come to live with. A lot of this totally depends upon what version of Windows a person started using, and what a person uses the computer for on a regular basis.

9

I call it the “file tree”, regardless of operating system. Though I may use the term “Finder” when on my mac, I’ve never really gotten used to calling it the “Explorer” in Windows. I blame that on Internet Explorer already purposing the name.

I consider neither of them programs or apps. They’re file trees.

10

I still tend to call it File Manager, which is what it was called in early versions of windows. I sometimes catch myself & correct to File Explorer so as not to be confused with IE.

11

I’ve been a Mac user for about 15 years and I call it Finder.

I don’t like it, and lots of hardcore Mac users don’t either (read any number of Mac bloggers reviews of Mac OS versions over the years, and there’s invariably a heavy sighing when they get to the section on Finder) It’s really flaky about remembering things, and can get into all sorts of weird states.

My most recent one: files in one directory are sorted by… I don’t know what. I’ve changed both the Arrange By… and the Sort By… settings, and they don’t budge.

Finder is clearly an application of sorts, though it’s a pretty special one, since Mac OS doesn’t actually let you kill it from any obvious control, just restart it.

I don’t love the Windows one either (and I couldn’t have come up with “Explorer” immediately).

12

I call the Mac one “Finder” and the Windows one “Explorer”, and call the general category of programs “file managers”. When I open a file, it’s usually through either the file manager window showing the contents of some folder, or via the “Recent files” option (which, of course, is also part of the file manager program). Moving or deleting files is always done via the file manager, and copying can be either the file manager or “Save as” in the individual app (and I’m annoyed that Apple changed the “Save as” functionality).

Then again, I also still sometimes call folders “directories”, and know why they’re called that, and still use the Terminal for some purposes. When I got my first Mac mumblety-mumble years ago, it was because I wanted a user-friendly Unix distribution.

13

If I were asking a person to go get a file through the windows explorer interface, I’d tell them to “find it in their file system” or “go to the folder in your computer where it is”. I don’t typically use the name “Explorer” because non-adept people just confuse it with Internet Explorer. Thanks for finally changing that, Microsoft. But I do know that it’s called Explorer, and if it crashes, I know what’s happening and how to restart it. I imagine most people don’t.

Anyone who doesn’t do their major forms of interacting with their files through their file system, be it Explorer or Finder, isn’t very computer savvy. Doing it through a program’s Open or Save dialogue is simply asking for trouble and confusion. That’s just the long and the short of it. Either they’ve been using computers so long (i.e. at least since Win95 era) and in such a limited, specific form (only for Excel documents, for example) that they’ve forgotten the basics entirely, they don’t use computers frequently enough to understand how they work, or they simply don’t use computers. You can think they’re experienced PC users but if they don’t understand the file system and what its use is, then they don’t grasp modern computing at its core.

14

If it was a Unix distro when you bought your first Mac, it really wasn’t that long ago. No earlier than 2001, with OS X.

ETA: I call it Finder on Mac. I call it “open a folder” on Windows.

15

Explorer (“Windows” is unnecessary) and Finder. I have my own biases but I had Finder especially bad in the way that you search in it. For searching Explorer sucks (just get Everything) and Finder is worse. Spotlight is better in that respect but I would mostly use it to find applications, and not files.

16

I’ve used PCs since well before Windows, and still use one heavily at work. About 12 years ago I ditched PCs at home and got a Mac and am on one right now. I’ve also used Sun workstations with BSD and SVR4 UNIX operating systems, running both Sunview and the X Windows system, but not for 20 years now.

I refer to “Explorer” on the PC and “Finder” on the Mac (I don’t remember what I called them on the Suns). I think of them as programs, and don’t think of them as “the computer”, although they don’t exactly fit the program model, in the sense that you can’t “quit” them the way you can quit other programs, or perhaps better to say that quitting them is somewhat the same as logging out or shutting down. This has always struck me as sort of messed up, like a promotional effort to suggest that they’re somehow more than just programs, for no reason. On the Mac, I also associate this weirdness with iTunes, because it’s supposed to be for listening to music and yet it’s the bridge between IOS and other platforms, including managing files (such as they are) and backups, which just seems to me to be embarrassingly lazy – if they built the functionality there first for historical reasons, I guess that’s amusing enough, but why in the world didn’t they straighten this all out?

I’ve never thought of the Desktop as more than a single-tier storage spot that also displays its contents in the background of my screen.

17

Assuming your friend is a casual or non computer user, I would advise giving as detailed instructions as possible while avoiding terms like “Finder” and “Explorer” as these are merely mumbo-jumbo to the uninitiated and cannot possibly help. “Desktop”, “window”, and “click” seem like safer ground (though with the last one, on some systems, you may find yourself having to explain the difference between a “left” and “right” click!)

18

I call it Windows Explorer, but I read MS documentation. It’s been a long time since I was doing support or tutoring, but I suppose I’d mostly start with something like “Go to your C drive” or “Open My Documents”, or “Do you know where your data files are?”