642581 - Indicate slow loading to user - Red cross of death on slow loading web pages

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[jacksnipe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15

Feature details:
Highlight an area of the FireFox window for slow loading web pages. I use FireFox v3 on Mac OS X and suffer from some quite slow loading web pages.

There is a button labelled "Stop loading this page" on the top right of the FireFox frame, it seems to have an X in either bold black or light grey depending upon whether a user can halt the web page from loading.

I don't know if it is possible to alter the bold black X's colour but would like to suggest that it's colour be altered from light grey, bold black, amber and red based on the following scheme:

web page loaded, (light grey)
web page has been loading for 0 to 4 seconds (bold black),
web page has been loading for 4 to 16 seconds (amber),
web page has been loading for 16 seconds or more (red).

A time-stamp would need to be recorded when the web page load was initiated for comparison.

I appreciate that the colours may need to be part of the desktop theme and that you may not agree with the times in seconds that I have chosen, there may even be recommended times in some specification document somewhere :).
I do wonder if 0, 8 and 32 should be the magic numbers (or 0, 10, 30 ?) ... programmers choice.


Reproducible: Sometimes




My aim here is to highlight slow loading pages regardless of machine specifications or internet capability, I am looking at this from the end user perspective not from a business view.
There are a whole host of variables that determine web page loading speed but the one constant measure is the end user sat in front of a web browser trying to load a web page, if the web page takes more than a certain length of time to load then the end user will hit the big X button and abandon it.

Using a nice obvious colour like amber and red makes it clear to all and sundry (including a web page developer and his boss) that there is a potential performance problem and it also draws attention to the button you need to press should you want to escape from this dire predicament.

A nice red X would also make people ask the question, Why ?, and the answer is three questions:
1/ Check your CPU usage, if 100 % then buy a better CPU.
2/ Check your Broadband capability, if less than 32000 (?) Bytes per second, buy more capability.
3/ Just how inefficient is this web site and am I paying to download all of this ?

Disability access: this is not something I initially considered but would need to be looked at, I guess there must currently be a mechanism to indicate to visually impaired users that an 'unexpected asynchronous event' has occurred and it must be possible to indicate what that event is. I would guess that we would at least need to report the longest load time expiration (16 or more seconds listed above) or perhaps all of the time expirations.

Alternate suggestions:
A traffic light, green, amber and red, but does everyone understand the traffic light system ?
A series of numbers, 1 ... 9, showing good to bad, but there are NLS issues.
An icon (?) positioned at the beginning or end of the URL input area, again using red, amber or green.
Web page loading bar shown in the "Status bar", lit in amber or red, but it is not available by default and not all users know about this.