Barney-15E wrote:
Did you have some third-party software that did that?
No, unless some software messed around with that without my knowledge.
The old paradigm of a Folder equating to a Finder Window has been gone for some time. A Finder Window is just a display environment for the contents of whatever folder you have selected. The Finder window is just a "viewer" that displays the content of the current selection.
You can set the View Options of a folder to "Always open in … view" and to browse in that view when you open a sub-folder, but the folder "opens" within the context of the current Finder "viewing" window.
I'm aware of that, although it is possible to get the Finder to behave more like the old spatial version by hiding the toolbar. That said, even in the now default explorer mode, it should (and always did) respect the "Always open in … view" settings when browsing a folder's content. For example, when I have a Finder window in icon view, and open a subfolder that I have set to always open in list view in that window, the window switches to list view. When I click the "back" arrow in the toolbar, it returns to icon view. It still does that, but – to stress this again – does not save any changes to the display settings beyond the next restart.
If you have a way to open a folder not from a current Finder window (like Spotlight), it should open in the last used configuration.
Again: it does not.
As the ability to "Open in New Window" was dropped, …
As mentioned, hiding the toolbar switches to spatial mode. Secondly, even in explorer mode you can open every folder in a new window by holding down command while double clicking or by selecting "Open in New Window" in the folder's context menu.
As soon as you open the folder in another Finder view window, the size and position will be lost, but it seems to retain the view style.
That's not the case (or at least it wasn't): size and position information for a subfolder were not overwritten when opening it in an already existing Finder window. Anyway, this isn't the problem here or what I'm talking about.