16 Facts About Windows Explorer

File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards.

Windows Explorer was first included with Windows 95 as a replacement for File Manager, which came with all versions of Windows 3.

Windows Explorer could be accessed by double-clicking the new My Computer desktop icon or launched from the new Start Menu that replaced the earlier Program Manager.

Successive versions of Windows introduced new features and capabilities, removed other features, and generally progressed from being a simple file system navigation tool into a task-based file management system.

Windows Explorer includes significant changes from previous versions of Windows such as improved filtering, sorting, grouping and stacking.

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Windows Explorer Vista includes six search folders by default: recent documents, recent e-mail, recent music, recent pictures and videos, recent changed, and "Shared by Me".

Attributes sortable and searchable in Windows Explorer include pictures' dimensions, Exif data such as aperture and exposure, video duration and framerate and width.

Windows Explorer contains modifications in the visualization of files on a computer.

The task panes from Windows Explorer XP are replaced with a toolbar on top and a navigation pane on the left.

Windows Explorer Vista saw the introduction of the breadcrumb bar for easier navigation.

Windows Explorer Vista introduced precluded support for the Media Transfer Protocol.

The Toolbar button in Windows Explorer to go up one folder from the current folder has been removed .

For example, if a folder contains many large video files totaling hundreds of gigabytes, and the Window Explorer pane is in Details view mode showing a property contained within the metadata, Windows Explorer might have to search the contents of the whole file for the meta data.

File Windows Explorer allows metadata for files to be added as NTFS alternate data streams, separate from the data stream for the file.

Special folders, such as My Computer and Network Places in Windows Explorer are implemented this way, as are Explorer views that let items in a mobile phone or digital camera be explored.

Source-control systems that use Windows Explorer to browse source repositories use Namespace extensions to allow Windows Explorer to browse the revisions.