772680 - Show a throbber when we're doing network activity

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Web Apps (PWAs), defect)

Description

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

This might just be the fault of apps, but I often find I tap on an in-app link and think nothing happened. A few seconds later the new page appears. Maybe we should show a throbber when we hit the network? Something small in the corner to let the user know we're thinking.

Maybe we can not show it for things in the app cache.

Comment 1

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

IMO the webapp should be handling should be handling this themselves. Please renom if there is a good reason for us to handle that for them.

Comment 2

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

I agree. Pages like Yelp and Facebook manage to show their own throbbers and I wouldn't want to taint their good experience to fix other people's bad ones. I'm not sure there's a good solution here....

Comment 3

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

(In reply to Wesley Johnston (:wesj) from comment #2)
> I agree. Pages like Yelp and Facebook manage to show their own throbbers and
> I wouldn't want to taint their good experience to fix other people's bad
> ones. I'm not sure there's a good solution here....

The only argument I could see possibly for making this important is if B2G is doing this already by default. Tony - Do you know?

Comment 4

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Looking at B2G's implementation, they do end up showing a progress bar at the top to indicate when the web app is loading or not. So this sounds like this is a valid bug, the question is how important is it from the UX side of the world.

Comment 5

[Ragavan S [:rags]]

We are not going to show progress bars for apps and instead let app developers support this on their own.

For improving app start up, we will work on the appcache fixes that have already landed for desktop, push for developer adoption, measure and propose next steps, as appropriate.