Re:Ask HN: Why does Gmail still have a loading progress bar?
by mschuster91 on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @08:39AM
(#6674938)
It is, but the datasets involved are huge, and the various AJAX requests do need their time.
20 emails in the inbox view (API endpoint 1), directory information (API endpoint 2), Google Chat (API endpoint 3), your most-frequented labels (API endpoint 3) - and especially the email-endpoints are quite traffic-intensive!
So the GMail team decided they'll load with a progress bar instead of creating four or five widgets with "loading..." placeholders (unlike I do at readme.fm). When you got a lot of various and/or traffic-intensive assets, then you have to choose one of those two models.
(Of course, you can take advantage of IDB/WebSQL/LocalStorage/AppCache, but that is only helping a little bit)
20 emails in the inbox view (API endpoint 1), directory information (API endpoint 2), Google Chat (API endpoint 3), your most-frequented labels (API endpoint 3) - and especially the email-endpoints are quite traffic-intensive!
So the GMail team decided they'll load with a progress bar instead of creating four or five widgets with "loading..." placeholders (unlike I do at readme.fm). When you got a lot of various and/or traffic-intensive assets, then you have to choose one of those two models.
(Of course, you can take advantage of IDB/WebSQL/LocalStorage/AppCache, but that is only helping a little bit)