[news_to_me]

I think there's two issues here that are often wrapped up together: 1. what is the status of my task, and 2. did the computer get stuck

If we could be sure the computer wouldn't get stuck (which is just a bug), then progress bars and spinners would be fine. If the task is as granular as you suggest, progress bars would be a great visual indicator, much better than text.

But since computers do get stuck, additional indicators should help with that. A spinner is supposed to show that a process isn't stuck, but those are fallible too. A textual representation ("bytes currently downloaded") sounds like a great addition to a progress bar. I've seen this a lot on linux distro installers, where you can click "details" below the progress bar to see the console output.

[Inityx]

I'm so sick and tired of seeing spinners that keep spinning, even after the process failed; this is an epidemic in web apps, where failures are often a bit too graceful and application state is silently corrupted.

[dec0dedab0de]

About 15 years ago a coworker had a spinner that was an animated gif, When I see people doing font awesome spinners it reminds me of that gif and I get just as angry.

[ema]

Maybe there should also be a "seconds since last progress update" counter. In case of a download it gets reset every time a new packet arrives.

[TeMPOraL]

> But since computers do get stuck, additional indicators should help with that.

They need to be trustworthy. For that, they need to be wired directly into the process doing the work. So no spinner gifs that are animated by the browser/renderer, and can spin forever even if your application dies. It needs to be something where any visual change is directly related to the operations you're monitoring.

That's why a list with textual descriptions of step is a great idea - it's literally too much work to implement it in a way other than the actual completion of a step displaying/ticking off a corresponding label. So seeing that, I'd know the software isn't lying to me.