[Bob Williams]

I believe what the OP is asking for is essentially just a graphical representation of the "x of y resources loaded" messages, and to have it associated with the thumbnails. You're viewing a progress bar as a measure of *time* remaining, while the OP is wanting one that simply shows a measure of the number of *resources* remaining. Trying to guess time is bad since it's essentially unknown, but the resource count is known (generally) and so is a perfectly valid use of a progress bar. I'm pretty sure this is how progress bars have always worked in browsers, but a lot of people misinterpret them to purely represent time, which is why they are sometimes derided. Time is definitely a function of resources, but other factors in the function weigh much more heavily. That doesn't make the progress bar any less useful, though, which is why OG provides a textual version in the status bar (that is, when the site hasn't decided to hide it on you...).

Anyway, I think this makes great sense in OW. It's the same information you're already given (the resource count), but displayed graphically and in a place where we can see it without having to switch to a tab. Right now, I have 24 tabs visible in my tab drawer. If I crash, then on restart I just just get to watch a bunch of pinwheels spin for a completely indeterminate amount of time. Further, all that loading slows OW down to a crawl, so switching between tabs is a pain, though I can read a page just fine. But which one to read? The only way to know if the page is 95% loaded and simply waiting on an ad, or wether it's still waiting for the initial response from the server, is to switch to the tab and see. A graphical resource load progress bar right on the thumbnails would give me very useful state information for all visible tabs at a mere glance. The activity monitor helps a bit, but its takes up a lot of ever-valuable screen real estate, it's loaded with far more information than is necessary for this simple task, and I've found it rather cumbersome to use--especially when there is a lot of activity going on.

Incidentally, this is very closely related to a long-time pet peeve of mine: browsers refusing to honor requests to stop loading pages. Sometimes, they wait to finish loading a slow-loading resource, and sometimes they wait to finish loading the entire page, but no matter how they stall, I *hate* it. It's a frustrating game of clicking the Stop button, hitting escape, and hitting cmd-., over and over, just trying to get *something* to work. At least OW has separate Reload and Stop buttons; in Safari, it's the same button, so you click Stop, have it ignored until the page is done, and then watch the browser process your click as a click on Restart, which means you get to start the whole, painful process all over again. Every browser I've ever used on every computer has suffered from this, and I'm not sure why. It's as though they simply can't back out of the thread stack on demand. Whatever the reason, it's annoying!