On the Web, the term "breadcrumbs" refers to the clickable path that shows each level as you tunnel into a Web site. Levels in Web breadcrumbs are often separated by the pipe ( | ) or greater-than ( > ) symbol. The hyperlinks make it easy to jump back to specific pages you've already visited.

Microsoft applied that user interface technique to the navigation, or address, bar in Windows Explorer windows. Graphical breadcrumbs is a programmatic version of the drill-down hypertext navigational systems commonly used on the Web. So, for example, when you're in Computer (what's called My Computer in XP), and you drill into Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > Macromedia > HomeSite 5, the Address bar displays the breadcrumbs, showing each level, like this:

Each level, such as Program Files, is clickable. And when you click it, you open that folder instead. That makes it easy to back up, take a different branch, and so forth. You thought what you were looking for was on Drive C: and now you realize it's on Drive D:? No problem -- just click the step right before "Local Disk (C:)," usually "Computer," and choose Local Disk (D:) from the drop-down menu.

Even better, the arrows between folders are also clickable. When you click one, a drop-down menu opens that offers all the other folders and files it contains. So if you click the arrow to the right of the Program Files folder, you'll see a drop-down menu displaying all your installed application folders.

This is a very simple user interface that makes graphical navigation much faster than in previous versions of Windows, which usually defaulted to editing the path statement in the Address bar or opening a new window and starting over. Speaking of which, you can also still do that. Just click the icon that's inside the address bar all the way to the left (if Computer is the first item on the bar, it will create a mini-rendition of the Computer icon). By doing that, you make the address line text editable, and you can type in any traditional path statement you want, using backslashes as separators. A type-ahead feature helps you to type the exact spelling or lets you click to advance. The only drawback with this feature is that it's not obvious how you get back to graphical breadcrumbs mode. Resorting to the Escape key works; nothing else we tried did. It's not even on the context menu.