Lies, Damn Lies and Progress Indicators¶

Here are some you may have met. (Click start, in a modern non-Microsoft* browser, on each one.)

The perfect progress indicator (rarely seen in the wild).

The software installer progress bar

The software uninstaller progress bar

The media-download progress bar.

The software update progress bar.

No wonder so many cop out and use one of these:

* [Why non-Microsoft? Before going all HTML5 and SVG on this blog I made a point of testing things with Internet Explorer 9 and was delighted to find that everything seemed to work fine there. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to test SMIL-based SVG animation, which works (you guessed it) on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, iPhone, iPad and even newer Androids, but not, in fact, Internet Explorer 9.]