Progress bar, the lie we all accept

posted by  jhorra (5)  15 months ago (blogs.msdn.com)

Remember the good old days, when a progress bar in the user interface actually provided an indication of, well, progress? Alas, today the progress bar devolved into little more than a dancing monkey, doing the electric slide back and forth in its tiny box in an attempt to simultaneously communicate to me that something is happening while also trying to distract me from from the fact that I'll be waiting some indeterminate period of time for that thing to finish.

In the beginning, progress bars made a credible attempt to demonstrate the percentage of comple