Okay, death *TO* the lame Recycle Bin confirmation dialog in Windows

Thanks to those of you who pointed out that the first Windows delete confirmation dialog described in the previous post only appears when the user presses the Del key, but not if they use drag and drop. (I’d been trying to reproduce the dialog using drag and drop.)

Both Windows and the Mac offer multi-key keyboard shortcuts (Shift+Del and Command+Backspace, respectively) to delete a file without displaying a confirmation dialog. Since the Mac doesn’t offer a single key shortcut for deleting a file, it has no need of a confirmation dialog. Personally, I find this to be an elegant answer, although it’s inconceivable that Windows would take its Del shortcut away.

I still argue that the dialog in Windows should fade away. As a comment to the earlier post describes, the dialog would be an appropriate place to educate the user on how the Recycle Bin works, where to find it, and how to get things back out of it. Once the user has figured out how the Recycle Bin works, they should be able to easily get rid of the dialog with an option in the dialog itself (and not in a property dialog far away). Alternatively, Windows could simply track user actions and determine when the user no longer required this education.