[wruza]

The problem with progress bars is us. We expect different behavior and the most population has wrong idea about how systems work. While an average Joe likes pulsing bars that advance regardless, other people hate it, because with time (years of experience) it obviously feels bogus.

Best (honest) progress bars are still those of software package managers, because they simply update on a percentage, have no step/idle animations and always show where you are exactly.

Surprisingly, MS has recently done a great job with explorer's copy progress by showing a graph. Filesystems and disks have nonlinear performance and rather than trying to extrapolate, they allow you to see when caches exhaust and the speed falls to its final value. When it stops or starts to degrade, you see that too and may try to pause a competing/interfering process.