I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable
They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask
S3 is one of the last things I would manage from any GUI. I don’t use GUIs when I’m searching or listing local files either.
Besides the S3 cli commands are some of the most intuitive.
S3 is not a file system though and is a big blob of objects with tags. I think the worse thing AWS ever did was present S3 as a file system in the web console.
How would that even work on the API level efficiency given how S3 is architected? It’s clear given their optimization techniques they tell you to use that S3 is optimized for prefix style searching. That’s all they offer from the web console, the cli or the SDKs.
It would amount to retrieving everything from the S3 conceptual “index database” and doing a non optimized sort when everything is architected to search based on the key and a key prefix.
It’s far more efficient to let the client get a subset by prefix (ie “folder”) and sort/filter by other meta data client side.
The AWS web UI is a trainwreck by design. Amazon doesn't want to spend a penny more on it than the bare minimum, and the APIs and CLI tools (which are the intended entry points for all serious customers) do the job exceedingly well.