1717946 - Indeterminate progress download icon is unclear

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[rcandres]

Attachment: Firefox-Nightly-Win,-3rd-download-is-a-progress-unknown,-breaks-progress-report.mkv

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

Downloads without a progress percentage have a strange appearance with the new circular download progress bar. It looks like the download is about 1/8th complete, but it's really an unknown progress. This makes it appear as if a very large download is making only slow progress, or that it has gotten stuck instead.

Also, if downloading something with unknown progress and something with known progress, if the known progress item completes the download progress jumps back down to 10% or so. It's very odd.

See the end (last 20 sec or so) of the attached video for what I mean.

Also, I'm not sure if this is a defect or enhancement. It's not broken but it doesn't seem as informative as it could be, so probably an enhancement?

Expected results:

I can't actually recall how this worked with the linear progress bar, so perhaps it is just the new icon style that is messing with me, but I think changing the display method for indeterminate downloads would make it more clear what is happening.

Perhaps if they had a separate icon or color that would show (assuming there are no other downloads with progress) or that animates/spins in a different way to show waiting without a known progress. As it stands now it is too easy to mistake a download at 10% with an indeterminate download.

Examples:
-Regular downloads are blue, but indeterminate ones show a green 10%
-Indeterminate progress downloads show a busy spinner instead of a filling circle
-Indeterminate progress downloads have a full circle that fades in and out

Image examples (obviously would not be exactly the same since these are someone else's design, but along these lines and in monochrome):
-https://loading.io/spinner/download/-download-arrow-circle-slide
-https://loading.io/spinner/flat-reload/-reload-sync-ajax-get-fetch-flat-design
-https://loading.io/spinner/progress-pie/-circle-round-pie-progress-percent-ratio-pizza-color-palette

Comment 1

[Alin Ilea, Desktop QA]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Hi,
Thank you for opening this enhancement. I will set this as New and waiting for the developers opinion about it.

Thanks for your input.