User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20100124 Minefield/3.7a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20100124 Minefield/3.7a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) The pie-chart throbber was implemented in Bug 334697. Comparing to the old throbber, the pie-chart throbber is much more opaque and looks almost like a black circle, when it's near finishing loading (for example if one small image or script is taking very long to load). There are a few problems: * The color of progress bars is in most current OS blue or green, and throbbers and other loading indicators are bright gray in most cases. * When at almost 100%, the current pulsating black circle looks very unusual, almost like a broken favicon or an evil black hole, it doesn't tell the user the (usual) positive message of "hooray, loading is finished in a second". * The dark color doesn't match the Windows 7 design. Suggestions: * Make it green or blue ** But make sure it doesn't look like a radar screen sweep ** And make sure it is visible when the tab background is green/blue (for example because it is selected) * make it brighter/less opaque * use a horizontal loading bar instead? * When page layout is complete (for example the page favicon has loaded and there are only a few images and maybe scripts missing) display the page's favicon and put a small version of our pie throbber somewhere in a corner of the favicon. Reproducible: Always

See also Bug 521586. In any case brighter gray would be better. I agree that the current image looks like a broken (buggy) image; a black hole indeed, exactly. That was also my first impression. But overall the animated icon (the information) is a great improvement.

This is probably effectively WONTFIX... The mockups for the Firefox 3.7/4.0 themes are switching to using a progress-bar like UI at the top of the tab (see various blog entries on http://www.stephenhorlander.com/). That said, if someone wants to update the throbber for trunk before we get rid of it, that could be interesting to play with...

If the plan is to remove it again, do we have a bug for that? We need something to request blocking1.9.3 on.

I don't think so, the future theme update is still in the planning stage (though not for long).

The pie chart throbber has been replaced with a progress line.