I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.
What’s the point of a progress bar if it can’t display progress in a meaningful way anyways? It being at 90% often says nothing about how long it will take still. Might as well use a spinny thing to let you know it’s not frozen.
I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it’s still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that’s also the part that is less important.
I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.
What’s the point of a progress bar if it can’t display progress in a meaningful way anyways? It being at 90% often says nothing about how long it will take still. Might as well use a spinny thing to let you know it’s not frozen.
I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it’s still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that’s also the part that is less important.
FYI, that circle is called a throbber
Some cylinders have that name too
The cylinder cannot be harmed