This is really a matter of personal choice IMHO. I am fine with the current behavior (i.e. I expect to find older files at top). CC-ing Usability.

I don't think this is really a matter of personal choice, but of use cases. In some situations people will want to see the most recently modified items, while in other situations people -- even the same people -- will want to see the least recently modified items. You could conceivably do a field study of file manager users and measure how often they use each order. And in the absence of a strong external reason for one or the other, whichever people used most often should be the default. (And I don't think consistency with previous versions of Nautilus, or with file managers on other platforms, counts as a strong external reason.)

In the absence of a study like that, we rely on our personal experiences, and mine is consistent with Joachim's. A couple of weeks ago, I sorted my "to read" folder (mostly containing links to interesting Web articles) least recently modified first, to see how far behind I was getting in my reading. But I think that's the only time I've ever done that. Much, much more often, I sort folders most recently modified first -- either because I've just saved a document into the wrong folder by mistake and want to fish it out, or because I've just downloaded a file and want to find it after it's disappeared from Epiphany's download manager. I'd expect those use cases to be fairly common amongst people who sort by date at all, and if sorting least recently modified first really is wanted more often overall, I'd be very interested in learning why.

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug.
This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 533189 ***