Thunar + (i think) gvfs does fine with network drives, it mounts them as soon as I try to click on them. If I wanted otherwise I wouldn’t use the tool that’s meant to show me files when I want to look at them.

When administrating (an admittedly horribly set up) computer system I hate that Windows automatically saves the address without asking because then after turning the protections back on after installing a program from there, the users still see the network drive and want to play around with it.