[deathanatos]

UI toolkits include "indeterminate" progress bars. Back before AJAX spinners (really, a simplified form of indeterminate progress bars) took over, they were a blob that bounced back and forth, or scrolled left to right repeatedly, within the progress bar's trough. Sometimes, a barber pole. The good ones would only advance the animation so long as actual progress was occurring, so that a hung system was indicated by a hung animation.

There's no reason to lie.

[DaiPlusPlus]

The problem with AJAX spinners is that they’re often just GIFs or CSS animations that will keep on playing even if “the system has hung” (e.g. the AJAX request failed and there’s no client-side error handling logic, no retry, no error display, and no UI cleanup) so in that respect the situation now is worse than it was before.

[deathanatos]

Yes, I agree with that for the case of AJAX spinners. A lot of web software fails to handle errors (resulting in the AJAX spinner spinning on — I think we've all seen this all the time¹) and most don't connect progress events to the animation in any way. There's no reason web-based libraries couldn't provide utilities for that, other than they don't, the existing code is of poor quality, and the APIs that browsers provide don't really push one towards the high-quality solutions in any way (since you really have to either get this level of functionality from some sort of library, or build it yourself).

My point is that good UI is possible, there is even precedent for it, and that while we definitely need to do better perhaps with available APIs or tooling, that is not an excuse for the moral failing of lying to the user.

¹and I'd say that's even the mild case. A number of high-profile websites that encounter even edge cases — not even errors — just simply fail to render at all.