Re: Flipping url-show-status default

[James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>]

>>>>> "TZ" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

TZ> If you're loading a large file, yes (in the download manager, not in
TZ> the main window).  But the vast majority of use cases for HTTP are
TZ> tiny files and a progress bar for each one would be pointless.

Large is relative.  The variances of pipe bandwidth and latency are huge.  

And most images on the web are larger octet-wise -- often horribly
larger -- than they need to be.  The practice of optimizing images
for the web evaporated when site design moved from coders to graphic
artists.  Even the all-cell-phone-all-the-time kids don't seem to
understand the need to optimize download time.

TZ> Google Chrome, for instance, tells you it's loading the page, but
TZ> not each element within it.  There is no progress bar.

Chrome is not friendly.

TZ> Mozilla Firefox shows a tiny unobstrusive inaccurate progress bar for
TZ> the whole page in the lower left corner.

And the biggest change the ff nuts did to Mozilla was to ruin the UI.

Some useful improvements occurred in the low level code, but the UI
changes were almost all regressive.  (The URL bar background colour
change for TLS is the only UI progression I can think of.)

TZ> My proposal was to show the URL download progress in an unobstrusive
TZ> way, not to hide it altogether.

I missed that.  Appologies.

But when one is behind a tiny pipe (a straw, if you will) detailed
progress info is imperative.

My preference is sequential pipelined downloads, with n/m file count an
percentage of current file progress info (%age can be either numeric or
graphic).

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6