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The address bar in Windows Vista shows you the path of the folder whose contents is currently displayed in Windows Explorer. The bar appears at the top of the window above the toolbar (in XP, it's located immediately below the Standard Buttons toolbar). In addition, this bar is flanked on the right by a Search text box with its own More Search Options button — and with Back, Forward, and Recent Pages buttons on the left.
In Windows XP, the Back and Forward buttons are part of Standard Buttons toolbar along with an Up button, which is totally absent in Vista. Rather than the Up button (to move up a level in the navigation hierarchy), Vista gives you a Recent Pages drop-down button (the blue triangle pointing downward). When you click this button, Vista displays a drop-down menu showing you all the folders you opened both before and after opening the current folder. To redisplay the contents of a particular you folder you visited, just click its name on this drop-down menu.
 | One really big difference between the address bar in Vista and that in Windows XP is the way in which the current folder path is displayed on the bar. In place of the backslash (\) separators and the all-squished-together-with-no-spaces pathname, Vista employs black right-pointing triangles with plenty of space in between the different folder names that make up the path. Moreover, the Vista pathname begins with your username rather than the drive letter. |
If you select the wrong folder as you're building the path by opening subfolders at lower levels in the file hierarchy, you can back up a level and select another folder on that level by clicking the right-pointing triangle immediately in front of the folder you selected by mistake. Vista then displays a drop-down menu with the names of all the folders at that level and you can select the correct one by clicking its name on this list.
| If the path is too long to display all its components on the address bar, a << button appears at the beginning of the pathname. Click this button to display a drop-down menu that lists all individual folders and subfolders in the hierarchical path in the top portion of the menu from the folder immediately above to the Windows desktop. The bottom portion of this drop-down menu lists other folders (from your personal folder to the Recycle Bin) on your computer that you can open by clicking their names. |
Just like the address bar in the Windows XP Explorer Window, the one in the Vista Explorer Window contains a drop-down button that that enables you to select the paths of previously opened folders from a drop-down menu. Surprise of surprises, clicking this drop-down button immediately converts the Vista path separated by black triangles into the old backslash-separated and mushed-together pathname of Windows XP. That's the way that all the paths to all the previously opened folders on the drop-down menu appear as well!
However, the moment that you click one of the old-fashioned mushed-together pathnames on this drop-down menu, Vista immediately converts it back into the new-fangled path separated by right-pointing black triangles.
The new Vista pathname designations with the right-pointing triangles are more accurate than the old ones in describing the actual process you followed to open the current folder. The older designations with the backslashes are, however, more accurate in describing the actual location of the folder in the computer's hierarchy of directories and files.
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