Nautilus – Make ‘Show Folders Before Files’ Option Persist

Why use an alternative? You can do that with Nautilus in 11.10 and I am sure with 12.04 will be the same.

To activate it use the following command on the terminal

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-browser false

To revert back to the original use this command

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-browser true

This is a user defined option.

I understand that this is a limited spacial mode where the windows do not follow the same behavior as they did using Nautilus2, this has, I believe, occurred because of the move to GTK+3 and there is no solution for it. The same behavior happens in Unity2 and GNOME-Shell.

I see what you're saying. Sadly there is no way to do this; you must do it globally in the preferences as you have.

My suggestion: If you need to know if a folder is newer/older than a file, you could set it to the List view (which shows some details on the files) and arrange the items by modification date. That would probably be the closest to what you're looking for.