Is there some way to get a more usable file chooser dialog?

On other operating systems the file chooser dialog in applications lets you do things like:

• see a larger preview of images in the current directory
• create a new folder
• change the view of the current directory between vertical list, horizontal list, small icons, large icons, thumbnails etc

I am in Ubuntu 12.04LTS (Unity) ...As far as I can tell there is no way to do any of these things. My file choosers look like this one I found on Google Images:

...except that I don't get the list-detail view, I get horizontal rows of icons.

I had a Google and found this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/240/ (and hundreds of duplicate requests for the same functionality)

So apparently this have been fixed since v8? How do I get it to work?

Quite frankly you can't "enable" it (file preview). It is an application specific feature, which most developers don't seem to bother with. You will notice that in some applications, (for example the GIMP) you will get image previews, but for the most part you won't see any.

As for other features like creating/deleting folders, these have (for some reason) not been implemented.

Update:

In Gnome 3.18, renaming and deleting folders will now be possible from the file manager, though some of the other outstanding features are not yet known to be in development at this time. Seems there is some hope for common sense out of the Gnome camp.