NProgress: slim, site-wide progress bars

You're not the only one.

Is this a part of a (very slowly) building trend towards a chrome-less browser?

Long ago we used to "login" to a site using BasicAuth and the browser defined login box.... it wasn't flexible/pretty enough so we started using s and integrated them into the page.

We had a path-like URL structure that we used to get to our documents, but our documents became more complex and the path-like structure became less human friendly and more like a unique id that should be under the hood.

We had back (and forward) buttons to navigate through our mainly hierarchical sites, but our sites became less linear so we used javascript to jump around.

Our complex non-linear documents became so complex that we didn't want to reload them all at once, so we started fetching parts of the page and needed to build our own progress indicators within the page.

Soon: Very little of the browser chrome will be relevant to the way we use the web.

It's nice looking, but I'd like to see some actual user testing on whether this kind of progress bar performs its most important task.

"What?" I hear you asking, "Of course it does! It shows how much longer you'll have to wait."

In which case I must inform you that giving the user information is not the most important function of a progress bar. The most important function of a progress bar is Time Travel.

That is to say, subjective time travel. Try this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/gUkgX/1/embedded/result/

First, click "No feedback". Wait for it. Feel how long it takes to run. Try not to count the seconds (you wouldn't usually do that on a real website) - just see how it feels. Next, click "Spinner", and then finally try "Progress bar".

Which one felt shortest?

Of course, they are all the same ten seconds. Yet the spinner feels faster than no feedback, and the progress bar feels faster still. Watching that bar fill up makes the time seem to pass faster.

And the progress bar is totally fake. In fact, it doesn't even take 10 seconds to fill. It fills in 9.2 seconds, starts out fast and slows down, and none of this has anything to do with what is really happening, which is that you're waiting for a 10 second timeout to fire.

My point with all of this is that in order for a progress bar to fulfill its duties as a time condenser, I suspect that it needs to be prominent. I get the idea of keeping the indicator out of the way and minimal, but I think this is misguided in this case.

Reminds me of this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/security_theat...

Sadly down now. :(

Follow this repo for more info: https://github.com/mparramont/nprogress

Also, I'll be documenting the process here: http://developingandstuff.blogspot.fr/2013/08/nprogress-no-j...

As preparation for a talk: https://twitter.com/mparramon/status/369945214494191616