[MichaelCrawford]

What really gets me down is when an indeterminate progress indicator is displayed during a determinate process.

There's no real way to know ahead of time how long a DNS lookup will take, so an indeterminate indicator is appropriate for that.

But when downloading a large file, the size of the file is often declared at the very start, in its HTTP header, yet we commonly get a spinning whirligig or a barber pole rather than an advancing bar.