# Why the heck can't MS make a progress indicator that works? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 20, 2009, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645 "2009-02-20T01:05:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/1 "2009-02-20T01:05:34Z")
So, I’m archiving (everyone’s) e-mail today, trying to clear up space on our Exchange server. The latest user I’m doing hasn’t had her e-mail cleaned up since 2000, and her mailbox has grown to over 4 gigs – so yeah, it’s taking a while. I should have been out the door a half hour ago, but I’ve been waiting for it to finish. Thing is, I have no idea how long that might take, because the Export progress bar has been doing its usual thing of counting down from “2 hours remaining…” to “1 second remaining…” pretty consistently every three or four minutes. How the hell do you write something that so consistently provides no helpful information about wait time at all? I mean, there are 60,000 discreet items in the mailbox, and it’s 4.3 gigs. These are known quantities. Surely there’s some way to provide some clue to the user about how far along we are in exporting them? Even a “Percentage done” would be fine. I know that a “time remaining” display presents some problems when it comes to predictability, but it must be possible to do a little better than that? Surely? Sweet jesus, it’s done. Just had to look away from the fecking progress bar. Thanks again, SDMB. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/2 "2009-02-20T01:10:57Z")
It’s not just MS - I’ve seen crappy, unhelpful progress bars on OSX, Linux, PalmOS and lord knows what embedded OS they use for touch screen photocopiers. I think it’s just that a lot of computing tasks are really quite difficult to predict - I suppose it could be done, but you’d end up with “please wait while the progress bar is prepared” first, which wouldn’t be better. ---
**Author:** ![Sierra\_Indigo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f0a364/32.png) [@Sierra\_Indigo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sierra_Indigo)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/3 "2009-02-20T01:15:51Z")
The progress bar is not to tell you how long something has left to complete. The progress bar is there to occasionally flicker, twitch, move or change numbers to reassure you that yes, something is still happening. It’s a placebo. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/4 "2009-02-20T01:57:23Z")
I would buy that **Sierra Indigo** , except sometimes the progress bar goes all the way to the right and just stays there… > [@Mangetout](#): > > It’s not just MS - I’ve seen crappy, unhelpful progress bars on OSX, Linux, PalmOS and lord knows what embedded OS they use for touch screen photocopiers. I think it’s just that a lot of computing tasks are really quite difficult to predict - I suppose it could be done, but you’d end up with “please wait while the progress bar is prepared” first, which wouldn’t be better. Plus there’s the element of OTHER applications/system functions in the background cutting in line at the processor in front of whatever it is you’re attempting to do. ---
**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/5 "2009-02-20T02:16:07Z")
It’s a scam and placebo. My personal favorite is “calculating disk space” that might take a minute. Huh? I can open windows explorer and the calculation is done in less than a second in which it shows me my harddrive space, and available space on it. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/6 "2009-02-20T02:36:51Z")
I hate Adobe progress bars. You know, the ones that go from left to right at a steady speed, and _repeat this action every three minutes as long as the process is running_. That’s not what a progress bar is for, you idiots! If you just want to show the presence of activity, use a spinner or something. You use a progress bar to show _progress!_ Look, I understand progress bars that move irregularly across their spaces. You’re incrementing the bar each time a task is done, and different tasks take different amounts of time. That’s a lot easier to figure out than calculating the amount of time a list of tasks will take and then decrementing that. But at least those progress bars bear a relation to the amount of progress that has taken place. Just scrolling the damn progress bar doesn’t! Stop it! And while I’m on the topic of Adobe… Why is Adobe software the only software for the Mac that has its own lumpy slow-as-hell get-in-the-way installer? Most Mac software, you drag the app bundle into the Applications directory. To delete it, you drag the bundle to the trash. You can use a program like Hazel to watch over the app’s auxiliary files like settings and caches and stuff, and it lets you know they’re there when you delete the app. Other Mac software, it comes as a package file that you run the standard system installer on, and these programs usually come with an uninstaller app. (Yes, Windows does this part better with it’s system-wide Add/Remove Programs utility.) And if you go down to the sublevels of the system, you can use command-line tools like MacPorts and Fink to install Unix software. These tools maintain their own databases of what’s installed, what version it is, and where it is, and they have their own uninstall commands. But Adobe has to be different. To install Adobe’s software, you run their elephantine installer. CS4 suite takes over an hour to install. You have to run the same installer to uninstall the programs as well. And when they’re installed, it’s not all tidy or anything. Every Adobe app gets its own directory, with all the subdirectories exposed. Installing the Mac version of CS4 is very much like installing a Windows app. If only Photoshop weren’t so addictive… ---
**Author:** ![Duckster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duckster/32/1244_2.png) [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/7 "2009-02-20T03:47:59Z")
So why is her mailbox 4 gigs in size? At work all of out mailboxes are hardcoded with a 150 MB limit. Go over it and all incoming email is rejected until you bring it back under the limit. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/8 "2009-02-20T03:56:28Z")
Oh yes. Why isn’t this in the pit? I’m actually considering pitting the OP for not putting a pittable thread in the pit. Progress bars that get to 958 in 5 seconds and stay there for 5 minutes! Argh! I know it’s not 100% predictable but how fucking hard can it be to not come out with the worst possible outcome! Being misled is worse than not being told at all. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/9 "2009-02-20T16:24:40Z")
> [@Duckster](#): > > So why is her mailbox 4 gigs in size? > > At work all of out mailboxes are hardcoded with a 150 MB limit. Go over it and all incoming email is rejected until you bring it back under the limit. Wow, that’s quite parsimonious. A hard limit like that would be impractical here - because of the nature of our business we send and receive a large volume of scanned documents and other large files. (It’s not completely uncommon for me to see “Updating inbox… 90MB…”) Also because of the nature of the business, we have a legal requirement to keep all correspondence (including e-mail) for at least two years. Anything that encouraged people to delete willy-nilly instead of having their mail archived properly would get us into trouble. > [@Askance](#): > > Argh! I know it’s not 100% predictable but how fucking hard can it be to not come out with the worst possible outcome! Being misled is worse than not being told at all. Exactly. If there are 50,000 pieces of mail, and 12,500 have been exported, then just tell me it’s fecking **25% finished**. A parenthetical “Approximately X minutes remaining” extrapolated from the elapsed time and remaining number of items would be fine, if you really want one - but I’m happy to do that in my head if I need to. I can’t even _begin_ to imagine what sort of calculation is used that results in a regular “Two Hours –\> One Second” sawtooth for the _entire duration of the operation_. I begin to think that it isn’t even remotely connected to the transfer of data, and is just the pure whimsy of a perverse and misanthropic coder. “Ooh, this will drive them _insane!_” ---
**Author:** ![Casserole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b77776/32.png) [@Casserole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Casserole)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/10 "2009-02-20T16:50:02Z")
While I can’t say that this only seems to happen on Windows, I find it happens much less often on my Linux systems. I remember way back in the early nineties, Internet Explorer put a progress bar at the bottom right of the screen to tell you a page was loading. I believe they still do, but that’s beside the point. Back then, if for some reason your modem went ka-put, the progress bar still crept up, slowly. Stupid 7-year-old me decided to wait for it to finish, and was completely surprised when the progress bar reached 100%, and **absolutely nothing happened.** ☹ ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/11 "2009-02-20T16:55:49Z")
It’s unpredictable because it can’t be predicted. There can be various things that slow the process – yes, even moving files. Maybe the disk space is fragmented, for instance. The purpose of the bar is to show you that something is working, and believe me, that’s important. When we do updates, the software is installed after login without any status bar. Everyone complains it takes way to long to boot up. With a status bar, they wouldn’t. I used to write scripts to install software. You could add a fake “status bar” display to let people know things were still working. The bar would move from left to right, then start over again as long as the “bar” displayed. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/12 "2009-02-20T17:03:01Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > The purpose of the bar is to show you that something is working… No, the purpose of a progress bar is to show how much of the task is done. If you want to show only that activity is present, you use a spinner or some other animation that does not supply additional false information. > [@RealityChuck](#): > > I used to write scripts to install software. You could add a fake “status bar” display to let people know things were still working. The bar would move from left to right, then start over again as long as the “bar” displayed. This is exactly what not to do. ---
**Author:** ![Shark\_Sandwich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f04885/32.png) [@Shark\_Sandwich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shark_Sandwich)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2009, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-heck-cant-ms-make-a-progress-indicator-that-works/486645/13 "2009-02-20T17:58:47Z")
Where I used to work, we had a piece of crap client software that had to be synchonized with the main server every other day or so and it had a “time elapsed” bar that would count up from zero to show how long it’s taken. It usually took a few minutes. So one day I’m synchronizing, and I notice the counter does this: 1:57:57 1:57:58 1:57:59 1:57:60 1:58:00 So then I waited to see what happened when it rolled over to 2 minutes, and what happened? 1:59:58 1:59:59 1:60:60 2:00:00 Ugh. :smack: