Comment 12 for bug 389176

I just want to add that I rarely extract archives. Most of the time I open them using file roller and then select a specific file inside the archive to open.
I also think that this (the current way) is very consistent and intuitive. I can open an archive just like a folder (and from a user's point of view there really is not much difference IMO), just that it opens in file-roller instead of Nautilus. I then open a file from inside the archive by another double click within file-roller.

Extracting on double click is really bad IMO, since
a) this is not what one would expect, i.e. showing the content of a file/archive
b) In folders with many files in it, a user might not notice that the archive has been extracted. The folder and hard disk fills up and the user wonders why nothing happens when clicking the archive. On novice Windows users' computers I often see folders like "New folder"/"Unnamed folder" (don't know how exactly they are called in the English version). This is because creating a new folder happens easily by mistake but the user does not notice that they has done anything!
c) there may be security concerns, since files may unintentionally be written to some place without further approval and then e.g. the file manager starts to generate file previews or files may have bad file names (say with weird Unicode file names, that look like something else).

As a conclusion, it may IMO be feasible to ask the user on double click if they wants to extract of view/open the archive. On the other hand I think that defaulting to open and having "extract here" in the context menu is the far better solution for me at least.