647811 - No visual GUI indication that the app has indeed started and is currently initializing.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Michel Dubuc]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

Good morning!

One thing that has been annoying me since testing Firefox4 beta's and then using the release is that when one starts it up in windows, after double clicking on it's icon on the desktop, it launches but one does not know that it is launching until the main frame window is displayed 30 to 40 seconds later. Thus, I click on the app icon several times not knowing if I double clicked on it properly, or if it even started with the first double click, then I have several instances of the app up a minute later.

What I suggest would be a splash window or something similar displayed right after start-up showing the user that the app has indeed started and is currently initializing. If one examines the M$ Outlook 2010 splash window, it even tells you what exactly it's initializing in a static text box IE: (Plug-In *PlugInName* 1 of 15 or such).

I do not recall if Firefox under my Ubuntu 10.10 does the same thing but it probably does. 

Thanks again for the great browser, I changed to it from IE8 three to four months ago and it's the best thing that I did.

My system specs:
Microsoft WindowsXP Home SP3
Acer AspireOne D250 2 Gig RAM


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Siddhartha Dugar [:sdrocking]]

See Bug 198605

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Splash screens are ... so 90's. It got removed when Firefox wasn't even called Firefox yet. The main reason was that it actually slowed down the startup.

Besides, you can't show the splash screen when the first part of the application is still loading. Modern operating systems often shown an animation (f.u. a bouncing icon) to help here.

Comment 3

[Michel Dubuc]

There are a number of items in Bug 198605 that do relate to my question specially the one pertaining to the Windows wait cursor not activating.

>  Modern operating systems often shown an animation f.u. a bouncing icon) to help here.

I choose to use Safari with my modern operating system, Mac OSX 10.6.x, my concern is the above behavior with Firefox4 under Windows and Linux.

> Splash screens are ... so 90's. It got removed when Firefox wasn't even called
> Firefox yet. The main reason was that it actually slowed down the startup.

Even so, at least it graphically shows that something is happening, besides, mostly all windows apps these days have a splash screen - even more than they used to back in the 90's. How resource intensive can displaying a bitmap/window be?
 
> Besides, you can't show the splash screen when the first part of the
> application is still loading.

I can do it at creation time even before doing anything else using Visual C++ in a Win32 App but there is a good chance that your using something else.

Thank you!

Michel