But if you expect the request to take some amount of time, how do you communicate that to the user? Even if you don’t know the actual progress, the spinning cu

But if you expect the request to take some amount of time, how do you communicate that to the user? Even if you don’t know the actual progress, the spinning cursor still provides useful information, namely “this is normal”. Edit: Fwiw, I would agree with you if we were discussing progress bars as opposed to spinners. Fake progress bars suck.