Difference in tab completion and order in Windows Explorer and the Open/Save file dialog

Question

Ok, this has bugged me for some time now. To reproduce:

1. Open Windows explorer.
2. Press Alt+D to set focus to the navigation bar.
3. Begin typing a (valid) path, i.e., "\Progr".
4. Press TAB and "Program Files" is selected as the best match and populated into the nav bar.
5. Press Enter (\Program Files is opened in the folder pane).
6. Begin typing the name of a folder and it will be selected in the folder pane (i.e., incremental search. In XP you had to TAB three times to get there, Windows 7 places focus there automatically. Very nice).

Now, open a program, let's say, Excel.

1. Press Ctrl+O to open the Open File Dialog.
2. Press Alt+D to set focus to the nav bar.
3. Begin typing a (valid) path, i.e., "\Progr".
4. Press TAB and focus is now set to the search text area to the right. The nav bar is reset to its last value.

Why is this? This is terribly annoying and prevents me from quickly navigating to a directory via the keyboard.

Also, if you press the Down arrow key instead of Tab to select the suggested folder path and then press Enter, focus is not set to the folder pane as it is in explorer. If you begin typing to select a directory the nav bar still has focus and you have to press TAB four times to set focus to the folder pane.

This annoys me to no end as I use the keyboard almost exclusively to perform actions in Windows. Does anyone around here have any insight into why this behavior is inconsistent between Explorer and file dialogs in Windows?

Raymond Chen, if you're here, I could sure use your input.

Answer 1

Recap

Let's first establish that using Tab generally cycles through elements in a Windows dialog.

If we select the breadcrumb bar in either the Open common file dialog or Windows Explorer and press Tab, the focus will be moved to the neighboring search/filter box.

When typing into the breadcrumb bar, a popup list is opened. This is also identical in both instances:

Problem

The problem is what happens if you press Tab now.

Windows Explorer will focus the list, as shown here:

But the common dialog will move the focus to the Search box.

Conclusion

Let's first note that press the Down key would move the focus to the list in both cases. But you will find this little helpful (as you already noted).

Both the common dialog and Windows Explorer seem to use the same breadcrumb control. So why do they behave differently?

When I select an entry in the auto-completion suggestion list and press Enter, the breadcrumb bar will send a windows message to tell the rest of the application about it.

The shell team decided to only switch the file listing in the common dialog to the newly selected path when they receive that message.
The Explorer team decided to additionally place focus in the file listing.

Why is that?

I don't know. I only know if you press Alt+N in the common dialog, it will focus the File name box, which has the same auto-completion.

After using that to the extend you like, you can press Shift+Tab to focus the file list. Now you're focused on the file listing and can use it the way you're used to.

If you just can't live with that, you'll have to contact Microsoft support about it and they might actually escalate it to a bug report, who knows. But I doubt they would change such core behavior in a released version of Windows no matter how wrong it is (and if you follow Raymond Chen's blog, you know that to be true).