Comment 28 for bug 389176

I'm totally against it. it seems more like somebody's pet bug than something useful for the majority of users (including newbies).

When somebody gets an archive, they want so see what's inside or work on it. On both cases, extracting the contents isn't required at all, and would be unexpected. Working inside the archive is better, because else you'd have to manage duplicates with different contents. You'd have to delete a file in the folder, then delete it again in the archive - or delete the archive, then recreate the archive again (provided you're technical enough to have noticed the exact format the archive was in, which is impossible unless you've learn what different archives there are, and their usual extensions.

Then there's the numerous times you need to read some documentation on a tar.gz that's somewhere where you don't have write permissions. You can't extract it in the same repository, so you'd end up having an error message (really bad) or two different "default" behaviours for the same tool (even worse).

The bug reported might have developed a special work flow, but asking everybody to go with it is a bit far-fetched, and the results are not only confusing for non-technical users, they'd introduce new bugs and usability issues.

As for opening a confirmation dialog, it's also going backwards usability-wise (the "Extract to folder" is already easily accessible, and doesn't get used often) and a new source of confusion for users ("What should I choose?") who don't know the difference.