What happened to progress bars? I miss them. Specifically, I miss having an idea of how long something is going to take. Instead, what we get is bullshit like this:
Or this:
Or this:
None of these are helpful. All they do is show that "something" is supposedly happening, but not how long it is taking or even if the "something" has frozen up along the way. I'm sure we've all encountered a situation where you're stuck looking at one of these, unsure if the process is actually stuck or bugged, or if it's just taking an inordinately long time.
These are a development of this type of progress bar, which today I learned is called a "marquee" progress bar:
Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's own documentation on this control, they do indeed intend for it to be used in a way that "shows activity, but does not indicate what proportion of the task is complete".
This is a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, I know, but when my office coffee machine is better at displaying its progress through a task than a powerful computer, I feel like there might be something a little bit wrong somewhere!
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