I won't say I am new to Ubuntu, but I have been on and off for several years — although I find myself on Ubuntu more than on Windows nowadays I still consider myself a newbie. I am currently using 13.10 and I also remember having this issue in 12.04 LS, as well.
After I download anything in Chrome or Firefox. There is this option in the downloads page of the browser (Ctrl+J) to open the file location. It is "Open containing folder" in Firefox and "Show in folder" in Google Chrome. When I click it these links in the downloads page of the browser, the "Downloads" folder opens as expected, but it still doesn't highlight the file in the directory. This becomes extremely painful to find the file especially if you have a ton of files in your Downloads folder. Of course I can switch to list view and sort the items by date and find the file. However, don't you guys think it should actually highlight the file when Nautilus opens?
It was already posted by some other user a month ago and I think the issue was not addressed properly. Ubuntu Community Forums
Is it a bug or is this normal and something I have to deal with? I'm assuming it's a bug since the feature sounds pretty basic and its there on Windows and OS X.
Best Answer
It's a longstanding issue which was reported here for Chromium. At that time, there was no way to select an individual item in a folder, only open the folder, and so was marked as fixed, with half of it being implemented. However, according to this bug report, Nautilus has implemented the ability to select individual items, and it seems so has Dolphin (KDE equivalent of Nautilus). Perhaps it's time to open a new bug on this.