The first time I've seen something similar was in IE5, I think. The loading indicator oscillates before connecting to the server. Once connected, it started pro

The first time I've seen something similar was in IE5, I think. The loading indicator oscillates before connecting to the server. Once connected, it started progressing even without receiving any packet. It was easy to tell because win9x had a nice indicator when network packets were sent or received. It seemed very strange since the beginning: "It is not right... it is progressing but I see no packets incoming...". The progress indicator then progresses slower and slower until it reaches half the bar exactly when timeout is reached and a popup with an error message is shown. It was very frustrating because I could no longer trust the browser. Now, if I want to know if there is progress or not, I have to look at the network indicator which could be disturbed by other network activity. At the time, connections failing were not all that rare and being able to quickly retry to load the page was an important time saver because you didn't had to wait for the timeout. I once saw my father, who was not well versed, waiting for a page that simply would not load, but instead of retrying he just kept waiting until the indicator slowly slowed down to reach half the bar and only then tell him that the timeout was reached. I approached and said: "It is not loading, try again.", he said: "It is progressing!", I said: "I don't think it is progressing... I think they are lying to us.". We then went back to Netscape Navigator. This is bad UI. No matter what experts or even tests say. A lie is a lie and is not something a system should do to the user. The correct way to do this is to use an indicator that oscillates or runs around. I think they were invented for exactly that case.