[tyingq]

I suspect fake progress bars do pretty well in a/b testing for page abandons, versus nothing at all. Especially if they show more "done" than not. I don't like it myself, but perhaps it's comforting to those that don't know better.

[leesalminen]

Can confirm, they work great for users. We had a system where some old things were traditional POST+redirect and the rest was all React with progress bars, disabling buttons when submitting, etc. Users demanded we make everything use progress bars because it's "faster". Our p95 DOM render was 400ms so it wasn't "slow" to begin with. I'm confident it really was the progress bar.

[atq2119]

> Our p95 DOM render was 400ms so it wasn't "slow" to begin with.

Not sure why exactly you put quotation marks there, but 400ms is incredibly slow, at least relative to human perception and what computers should be able to do. Consider what AAA games can render in 16ms.

[leesalminen]

Would love to see a web app you've built that does a HTTPS GET round-trip plus browser render in 16ms.