Please could you talk to the IE team about their progress bars explicitly lying to the user? I understand that giving immediate feedback is important as it can greatly increase perceived responsiveness, but that damn thing (on both desktop and Windows Phone 8) can climb to ~80% before even the first byte is received (it might even manage ~80% before the DNS lookup has returned though I've not tested to prove that). Have you every tried explaining to a non-technical user that their phone didn't "get nearly all the way then stopped" when loading a page? They simply don't believe "your web browsing software is lying to you, it didn't actually receive anything" and look at me as if I'm making things up to try hide that I simply don't understand the hinterwebs.
Of course the lie works: people think IE is more efficient than other browsers simply because on slow site and/or with slow connectivity the progress bar seems to initially push up faster than the one in FF/Chrome/other even though the actual page load time is the same.
I'm fine with little white lies to make the user feel more cared for (which is what fast "apparent response times" is all about: people personify technology so if you don't give the impression of immediate response they feel like some concious entity is actively ignoring them) but the IE progress bar takes that to an irritating extreme, to the point where it is detrimental to UX (I sometimes can't tell if the page is just loading slowly or nothing is transferring at all and I'm just going to get the "page not available" error in 20 seconds time).
It irritates me enough that it will be a factor in deciding what I buy when my current smartphone needs to be replaced (much as I like the Lumia 920; this, other Windows Phone annoyances, and comparative inexpensiveness, will make it difficult to justify not switching to Android next time).
Please could you talk to the IE team about their progress bars explicitly lying to the user? I understand that giving immediate feedback is important as it can greatly increase perceived responsiveness, but that damn thing (on both desktop and Windows Phone 8) can climb to ~80% before even the first byte is received (it might even manage ~80% before the DNS lookup has returned though I've not tested to prove that). Have you every tried explaining to a non-technical user that their phone didn't "get nearly all the way then stopped" when loading a page? They simply don't believe "your web browsing software is lying to you, it didn't actually receive anything" and look at me as if I'm making things up to try hide that I simply don't understand the hinterwebs.
Of course the lie works: people think IE is more efficient than other browsers simply because on slow site and/or with slow connectivity the progress bar seems to initially push up faster than the one in FF/Chrome/other even though the actual page load time is the same.
I'm fine with little white lies to make the user feel more cared for (which is what fast "apparent response times" is all about: people personify technology so if you don't give the impression of immediate response they feel like some concious entity is actively ignoring them) but the IE progress bar takes that to an irritating extreme, to the point where it is detrimental to UX (I sometimes can't tell if the page is just loading slowly or nothing is transferring at all and I'm just going to get the "page not available" error in 20 seconds time).
It irritates me enough that it will be a factor in deciding what I buy when my current smartphone needs to be replaced (much as I like the Lumia 920; this, other Windows Phone annoyances, and comparative inexpensiveness, will make it difficult to justify not switching to Android next time).