[Forrest]

Originally Posted by 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.

That's not the case, I have not been saying that a progress bar is strictly a measure of time. All that I have been saying is that it is a measure of something that, in this case, cannot be done accurately.

Load a complex page and watch the status bar. You will see the number of total resources increase. If a progress bar was used on every tab, you would see them constantly getting longer and shorter, then longer again, then shorter... as the pages load. This is unless the total measure of the progress bar was a constant value. For example, if a full bar was equal to 1000 resources. Otherwise OW would have to continually recalculate the overall measure of the bar.

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 agree that measuring time remaining to load is essentially unknown. However, measuring based on resource count is far from perfect. This is especially true with sites that use Flash and AJAX. They will send the site one resource (eg, a swf) and once that's loaded it may request a number of other resources (eg, jpegs, text files...)

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.

That's a good point. Even if the bar measured resources, a lot of people would think it measures time and thus be unhappy with its display.

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...).

The difference with the text version, IMHO, is it leaves the guesswork to the user. In other words - it's just reporting the facts and not trying to interpret them into some measure of completeness.

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.

First of all, if what you're looking for is an at-a-glance graphical representation of page loading status of multiple tabs, without having to click on them - that already exists. At least when "start drawing before entirely loaded" is checked, the tab thumbnails provide an indication of how much has loaded in a page. Furthermore, this is far more accurate than a resource count progress bar would be.

I'll use the example you cite - the ad. A progress bar isn't going to let you know if that's what's holding up the page. You will still have to click on the tab to see if you can read the content. Even if the page has loaded 99% of the resources, one can't tell from a progress bar that the last 1% is the text on the page. So if you're trying to avoid waiting for all your tabs to load before you can find one to read, a progress bar isn't the answer.

Instead, one can watch the existing thumbnails and once the content of one displays, switch to that tab.

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!

I completely agree with you on that. It's something that has bugged me for a long time.