From the Nautilus FAQ (maintained at http://http://nautilus.eazel.com/faq.html)

  • What is Nautilus?

    Nautilus is an open source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

  • Is Nautilus a web browser?

    As a shell, Nautilus has viewers for many different types of content. For HTML, there's a viewer that uses Embedded Mozilla. this is what people think of when they say, "It's a web browser too". You can also make alternate HTML viewer components and the extensibility of Nautilus means they'll show up in the shell. There's even an HTML component based on GtkHTML in the Nautilus sources, but the Mozilla-based one is working better.

    Nautilus can be downloaded from http://nautilus.eazel.org