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The default Java dialog supports two view modes: multi column and detail list. Advantage of the multi column view is that it allows to mouse scroll really fast within long lists of files. Advantage of the detail list view is that it provides more info: size and modification timestamp. Another thing is inconsistency with default open folder dialogs on most systems. I don't know of any system which would offer tree view mode by default.
> Another thing is inconsistency with default open folder dialogs on most systems. > I don't know of any system which would offer tree view mode by default. OS X
Thanks, I didn't know that. So this is not valid for Mac OS X. It is, however, still valid for other systems.
I tend to agree with Stepan's arguments about why could be list or detail view useful. However I don't see the issue with tree usage - tree is standard way to show directory structure on most default "explorers" on OSs, Win explorer, Nautilus...so users are used to it and they will have no problems ith tree. So I agree with adding list/detail view, although it seems very minor issue to me, and certainly this is not a bug in directory chooser, but lack of feature, so I'm changing to enhancement regression.
Argument for adding list/detail view is also to be able to sort by date.