1228388 - In-flight HTTP transfers are a bit too subtly indicated in the transfer log.

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Console, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jukka Jylänki]

Looking at the web console for current transfers, in-progress HTTP transfers are quite subtle to identify. In the following screenshot, exactly one of the HTTP transfers is still running (which?):

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40949268/dump/network_transfer_in_flight.png

Once the transfer has finished, the log retroactively is updated to show the following:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40949268/dump/network_transfers_finished.png

When looking at the first image, figuring out that the file castle.unity3D is still being transferred can be a bit difficult, since one has to know to look for something that is not there (the completion time in milliseconds).

It would be more descriptive to show "[HTTP/1.1 200 OK downloading...]" instead of just "[HTTP/1.1 200 OK]" for such transfers to make it explicitly known that the file transfer is currently still in progress?

Comment 1

[Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe]]

You can see the issue evaluating the following in the console with the XHR filter ON:

await fetch("https://httpstat.us/200?sleep=5000");

IMO we should have a common styling with the netmonitor too. Maybe we could have a spinner in the "pill" we use to display the http code?

Comment 2

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Thoughts on this:

• Having a better pending status is important as right now we don't have any indication
• Using the pill makes sense as it is the element that will always there
• We have to be careful with visual noise as a lot of elements go through the pending phase when the page loads

Options

• Empty/outlined gray pill
• Pulsing gray pull
• Use the tab loading indicator in the pill

Trying out option 1 and 2 might just work well enough as a stop-gap so we can make this a good first bug.