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Originally Posted by Forrest
That's not the case, I have not been saying that a progress bar is strictly a measure of time.
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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. |
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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. |
That said, they wouldn't necessarily need to get shorter. If resources are added to the count, the bars could just hold their current positions until they once again accurately represented the overall measure. I suspect this is what other browsers do, which explains why their progress bars tend to pause periodically. I would actually prefer they change fill length (perhaps with the addition of a high-water marker), though, as then you can see--and know--exactly what's happening instead of guessing.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
I completely agree that this is all far from optimal. Unfortunately, I can't think of a workable solution that *is* optimal.