ArticlesThere are lots of major issues with Internet Explorer that I wish they would fix. Here is a really, really minor one that annoys me again and again.
Just about all browsers follow a convention – a logo in the bar at the top that animates while the page is loading.
The logo in IE has been through several iterations – the current one is a picture of the Windows logo that waves in the wind while the download proceeds.
My complaint is the subtlety of the movement. You need to concentrate on the flag for several hundred milliseconds before you can tell whether it is really moving. That doesn’t sound long, but it is far longer than you need to focus on most progress indicators. [I realise that the total time taken to write this blog post is more than all of the time wasted on that icon, put together. That is so not the point.]
I should be careful what I wish for – I am not after something that is so aggressively attractive that it distracts me from working on another application while I wait. However, simply changing to a different colour while the file is loading would be nice.
Comment by Gord Schmidt on October 29, 2005
I rather liked the fact that the animation was so subtle that I didn’t distract me. I suppose I have not been losing precious milliseconds to deciphering it as I use the status bar to determine whether a page request is in progress.
Comment by Julian on October 29, 2005
Good advice, thanks. I will see if I can train myself to look there instead.