We actually do have a loading spinner. The problem is, it was designed for the download delay, and the download is now so fast that you don't even see it. The s

We actually do have a loading spinner. The problem is, it was designed for the download delay, and the download is now so fast that you don't even see it. The spinner was implemented back when popups were either just short HTML snippets or PDFs, so back then, the download time ~= total load time. But after we generalized the transclusion functionality to be able to pop up arbitrary sections or pages, across this and other websites, that is no longer the case. All of the delay is in parsing and rendering the fetched annotation/document. In the case of /Lorem (which I assume is the popup everyone is complaining about since it's in the abstract), it's a deliberately long torture-test document exercising every feature in many combinations; so, it just takes that long for your browser to render it. Said is going to try to rewrite the spinner to cover the full rendering. I have also been thinking that for links to pages, like /Lorem (rather than links to a specific section of a page, like '/Lorem#images'), the total load time may be too bad an experience and it's time to go back to creating annotations out of the page abstracts, and then having the full page popup if necessary. (I was going to do something like this anyway in order to get my essays fully integrated into the tag/link-bibliography & similar-links systems, but I was going to keep the popups as live popups; now I probably won't.)