Re:Ask HN: Why don't progress bars ever work properly?
by MichaelCrawford on Thursday December 18, 2014 @04:14PM
(#8769644)
What really gets me down is when an indeterminate progress indicator is displayed during a determinate process.
There's no real way to know ahead of time how long a DNS lookup will take, so an indeterminate indicator is appropriate for that.
But when downloading a large file, the size of the file is often declared at the very start, in its HTTP header, yet we commonly get a spinning whirligig or a barber pole rather than an advancing bar.
There's no real way to know ahead of time how long a DNS lookup will take, so an indeterminate indicator is appropriate for that.
But when downloading a large file, the size of the file is often declared at the very start, in its HTTP header, yet we commonly get a spinning whirligig or a barber pole rather than an advancing bar.