I found the part of Thunar's code that causes this. It's pretty clear that the author was trying to be clever, but has instead created confusing behavior. Here's a patch against thunar-0.9.0 (extracted from the deb source).
** Attachment added: "thunar-too-clever.patch" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15548000/thunar-too-clever.patch -- thunar swaps behavior of forward / back (next / previous) buttons https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/234217 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs