Google Drive is a perfect example of today's Google. "Good enough -- just barely".
It could be a very fast, efficient file browser with lots of format previews. It's not.
Doing basic "file manager" things such as viewing/extracting files from a .zip, editing a plain-text file, or viewing markdown… all those are just "too complicated" for a small indie company like Google.
Drive is incredibly powerful, and yet it's just awful compared to what it could be. If someone one day makes a "better web UI" for Drive with better functionality, but that still uses google drive in the backend, damn I want in.
Drive totally chokes if you have tons of tiny files. Lots of things do but Drive is the worst I have seen. I unwisely tried to put a full MAME set on Drive once, and then deleted it. The files never got “deleted” but rather were still in my drive, but not associated with any particular folder, so I could search for them but not see them any other way. Another time, lots of files ended up in Trash, but Drive was unable to ever actually empty the trash.
One thing that bites me every few months is that on iOS, the Google Drive file provider extension does not support basic operations. Like I think I have tried to just save a file to Google Drive via Files and it never uploaded. It’s not just that this stuff works with iCloud Drive, but also with Dropbox, Box, and even SFTP shares mounted via Secure Shellfish.
Indeed. The web UI is awful at this. If you look at the devtools when you select many files, you can see that there's one synchronous web request per file.
It could be a very fast, efficient file browser with lots of format previews. It's not.
Doing basic "file manager" things such as viewing/extracting files from a .zip, editing a plain-text file, or viewing markdown… all those are just "too complicated" for a small indie company like Google.
Drive is incredibly powerful, and yet it's just awful compared to what it could be. If someone one day makes a "better web UI" for Drive with better functionality, but that still uses google drive in the backend, damn I want in.