Blake Ross Reporter
	Description • 25 years ago

I know by this stage in development, this doesn't have a chance of being 
changed, but still I think it should be said . . .

Am I the only one who sees the barber shop-esque progress bar at the bottom as 
not only ugly, but useless?  It's just like Netscape 4.x's in that it doesn't 
truly show the progress of the page, but rather just if the page is still 
loading or not.  A person can just look at the animated icon in the toolbar if 
they want to know that much, or at the actual text in the status bar, or just 
at the actual page itself.  It seems useless to have a "progress" bar that 
doesn't truly show the progress.

Why not implement one that's more like Internet Explorer's, with a progress bar 
that - when it reaches the end - actually signifies that the page is done?

Just my 2 cents.

	Eli Goldberg
	Comment 1 • 25 years ago

That's a good question. German?

	Stephen Koren
	Comment 2 • 25 years ago

This is true. This has been a problem since Netscape's early development, way 
back when on Netscape 3.x. Something should be done about it ASAP.

	msuencks
	Comment 3 • 25 years ago

hmm .. I don't know about mozilla
but with Netscape 3.x and 4.x I liked
the progress bar very much. 

after you have a bit of expierenec how pages
are loaded the progress indicator made
enough sense.

the progress indicator of MSIE i strongly
disklike .. maybe it's just a gut feeling

of course there will be a better implementation
possible but I just had to defend the old progress
bar  here :-)

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 4 • 25 years ago

I have a lot of experience with how pages are loaded and I fail to see your 
point.  The progress indicator simply animates until the entire page has 
finished loading; in essence, it is only as good as the animated icon.  It 
provides absolutely no added information about how far along the page loading 
is, it just simply tells whether the page is done or not, and this can be 
learned by many other ways anyway (animated icon, seeing "Document: Done" in 
status bar, just looking at the page, etc).

I still hold my belief that a *progress* bar should do just what its name 
implies - show the PROGRESS; right now its about as useful and effective as a 
label that says "Done" and "Not Done"

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 5 • 25 years ago

Hm...upon further examination, perhaps the NS 4.x progress bar isn't as poorly 
designed as I had thought.  I never really noticed that there's an initial 
black and white progress that really does display the progress (I sometimes use 
IE, and when I do use netscape that first progress bar usually doesn't show 
since I have a high speed connection).  What's the logic behind this bar? It 
seems to be the real progress bar shows progress of loaded text and then the 
grey bouncing one shows images, perhaps?  If this is the case, I really do like 
this; if not, can someone provide some insight as to the exact logic behind the 
NS 4.x bar?

In any event, Mozilla's progress bar is not the same as NS 4.x and is entirely 
animated, it never shows progress.

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 6 • 25 years ago

A modified progress bar seems to have made its way into 2000042508.  marking 
FIXED, can anyone explain the logic behind it (sometimes it's %, sometimes it's 
animatiton)?

	Eli Goldberg
	Comment 7 • 25 years ago

Re-opening; I don't see any difference in the progress bar on the build that I 
checked.

German, if you change the progress bar behavior, could ya please insert the new 
behavior into the bug for verification? thanks!

[QA assigning to mpt@mailandnews.com, too.]

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 8 • 25 years ago

in 2000042608 I see the progress bar alternate between barber shop animation 
and IE-like progress meter with a centered, updating percentage label (i.e. 
45%).  It's similar to the one that NS 4.x uses, I still don't understand the 
logic behind it (see my post from a couple weeks ago about this).  You don't 
see it?

In any case, guess it should be reopened...what's been implemented still isn't 
what I originally asked for.  I was a little too eager to mark fixed :)

	rbs
	Comment 9 • 25 years ago

In the thread "Progress meter - a proposal" on n.p.m.xpfed,
(news://news.mozilla.org/38E77375.F6D65437%40softhome.com),
John Hallada made the following proposal:
http://sites.netscape.net/hallada/example.html

And evaughan replied as follows:

Subject: Re: Progress meter - a proposal
  Date: Eric Vaughan <evaughan@netscape.com>
 
Very interesting. When I originally wrote the progress meter I envisioned such
a thing. Its very possible. What we are currently doing it actively trying to
get the xpfe widgets almost completely written in XBL. This will allow you to
build and plug in such a progress meter very easily. Of course you will need
to get all the image thread information from Necco.
...snip...
-Eric

	shuang (gone)
	Comment 10 • 25 years ago

Set to M18.

	Matthew T (active 1999-2002)
	Comment 11 • 25 years ago

*** Bug 40588 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

	Matthew T (active 1999-2002)
	Comment 12 • 25 years ago

John Hallada's proposal looks like it's providing waaaaay too much information to 
be useful at a glance, and a glance is all you usually give a progress meter, 
really. What the user wants is something which will start at the beginning, 
finish at the end, and get there at a reasonably constant speed. And this is 
actually a pretty tall order, when you're dealing with Web pages with graphics 
and stuff in them.

I have a spec for Navigator's progress meter in the works; but it requires a fair 
bit of calculus which is too tricky for even my maths-studying friends to work 
out, so it might take a while to get the details sorted! The maths would also 
mean it probably couldn't be done just in XBL (if I understand XBL correctly). 
I'll post the spec here when I'm done.

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 13 • 25 years ago

I'm closing this up as fixed because what was covered in the scope of this bug 
has, since, been fixed.  This report only asked for better progress indication; 
at the time of filing it, there was only the animated barber pole meter.  Now 
we have a solid bar that incremenmts and a percentage label...that's more than 
enough to cover this bug.  Please file a separate RFE for that more complex 
progress meter that gives individual information for each page element (which 
personally I disagree with)

	Blake Ross Reporter
	Comment 14 • 24 years ago

vrfy fixed in new builds