Talk:Throbber

Does too
Actually safari does have a Throbber, it is the "spinning wheel" that also is being used by other applications.

If that is the wheel made out of a number of black/grey circles moving about (I've never used Safari!) Mozilla also uses that throbber- it's been kinda copied by a large number of Ajax online applications too. I think this page would benefit from an example of that generic throbber. 217.204.11.194 23:51, 19 March 2006 (UTC) CortalUX

spinning wheel
Does anyone know the origin of the spinning wheel? The wheel in this article looks nothing like the wheel that is used everywhere, although I lack the expertise (viz. there is a probably a program somewhere to do it but I can't find it) to lift the spinning wheel image that is used in Firefox, Safari and every Flex/AJAX web app. It's a standard OSX component - the Interface Builder that comes with OSX has it. I don't see Adobe (Macromedia) just adopting it from OSX though... maybe it has a different origin? I'm sure I've seen it even on the Microsoft site. It's only a matter of time before it's the universal throbber. Gorman 05:05, 7 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Five years later, I note the throbber in the article is still not the common version as almost no commonly used throbber has lines that "grow and shrink" like that. Not most web apps. Not OS X or iOS. The Android throbber is different, but nothing like the one in this article. I will replace it with a more common variant from ajaxload.info ("Generated gifs are totally free for use"). --X883 (talk) 19:26, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm also curious as to the origin of the "standard" spinning wheel now seen everywhere. It's certainly ubiquitous in the Apple world, but did they come up with the familiar design or simply popularize it? smileyborg (talk) 06:33, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

missing image
Throbber image for Internet Explorer missing (spinning world at top right of browser) CScott 20:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Firefox Throbber
I've removed it because the throbber was not the Firefox throbber. The image I removed was Image:Spinning_wheel_throbber.gif, and its description reads: "'Spinning wheel' throbber, created by the Tango Project, inspired by the Mac OS X spinner animation." I will repeat it again: This throbber is NOT used by Firefox. bCube.talk(contribs); 22:14, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Netscape easter egg throbber?
The large fire-breathing lizard throbber when entering about:mozilla in some versions of Netscape seems to be missing from the throbber list. It would be a nice addition. --62.51.153.52 14:11, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Text-mode equivalent
I've seen some Unix programs using a spinning line to indicate progress, for example fsck and FreeBSD's boot loader. I think this should be mentioned. Ian (77.253.160.200 (talk) 18:25, 23 July 2008 (UTC))
 * In BSD circles they call that a "twirling baton". It's done by subsequently displaying ascii chars slash, dash, backslash and vertical bar, alternated by backspace. Works even on a serial console. Perhaps it should be mentioned yes, it has the same function. Jaho (talk) 00:01, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I've seen this in some DRDOS utilities in the 1980s, similar to "  in progress... [/] ". Somewhat later, I also saw it in various DOS-based file compressor tools. For curiosity, it would be interesting to track down the origin of this text-based animation. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:16, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

First throbber
> One of the early (if not the earliest) uses of a throbber was in the NCSA Mosaic web browser of the early 1990s Did the smit "running man" predate this? smit was added to AIX] in 1989, though I'm not sure when the running man was added. (As an added bonus, if the command failed, the man fell flat on his face.) And really, even before there were graphical "throbbers" there were "spinners" that were done with text that served the same purpose. [[User:Dougmc|dougmc (talk) 05:32, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Here You can see a Fairlight boot-ROM, dated 1994, try to detect the necessary peripheral hardware to boot up the computer. It uses the character-graphics spinner described in the article. I pretty much suspect that this has been the same since the first machines in the 1970s. But of course it could have been introduced in a later version of the ROM. Maybe someone wants to investigate this further... --BjKa (talk) 13:18, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Criticism
Yes I know, not every wikipedia article needs a criticism section, but I've really started to hate these things. They're just as annoying as other animated GIFs, and they rarely or never indicate actual progress (only that the process drawing them hasn't jammed). First we got the progress bar, while it often moves slow and unevenly it still give a good impression of the actual progress. Then we got the "sliding progress bar" when downloading a file of unknown size, it still moved at at rate reflecting actual download speed and was somewhat useful. The throbber on the other hand just spins and spins and spins, while the server probably has forgotten your request long ago. They're annoying in Firefox, if my connection is bad I often open subsequent pages of an article in separate tabs, so they can load while I read the first page. Try concentrating on a text while several arrows spins wildly on top of the screen (double annoying as it serves as a constant reminder of how bad the connection is). In-page throbbers are even worse, they're usually used for the comments section in an article, if I read the page and this still shows when I come to the bottom it's a sure sign the comments download has stalled. For that reason I always think of that graphic with the three pulsating blue rectangles as "The Throbber of Fail". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.48.67.222 (talk) 22:37, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
 * You are making a good point here. However, your criticism is implementation specific. Of course, there's no point to just display an animated GIF (except for here in WP). In a good implementation, the rotation of the wheel must be triggered by some true progress in the application (at least that's how I have seen this implemented in text-based spinning wheels). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:26, 3 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think this is a 'shoot the messenger' thing - it's not the throbber you hate but the delay. A good throbber should stop throbbing if the process has failed. I know some students who put deliberate delays in their computing projects because they thought throbbers made it look more professional. I hope they ended up in a different career ! Usually if the user clicks the link again, the slow process re-starts from the beginning. If the user's patience-span is 3 seconds, but the process takes 4 seconds, they can keep clicking indefinitely, and the process never completes. Until they give up clicking ! I used a script that disabled whichever link the user had clicked on an intranet site - it helped prevent server 'meltdown' wonderfully ! --195.137.93.171 (talk) 22:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

"Throbber" naming, and differences vs "progress bar"
I work in the tech industry doing user interface development and never hear these referred to as "throbbers", although occasionally I see a viral tweet referencing this Wikipedia page as proof that "did you know this is called a throbber?". I'm not sure that this is the right name for the article.

Colloquially I almost always hear the term "loading spinner", though I would typically say "loading indicator" if trying not to be prescriptive about the form. Apple and Google both use the term "progress indicator" to refer to both "throbbers" and "progress bars" in their design systems; they both distinguish between linear/bar vs circular and between determinate vs indeterminate (though people typically think of the determinate progress bar vs an indeterminate circular indicator, all 2x2 combinations are possible).
 * https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/progress-indicators
 * https://m3.material.io/components/progress-indicators/guidelines

It seems like throbber article currently focuses only on circular indeterminate indicators, whereas the progress bar focuses primarily on linear determinate but also makes mention of the other two (linear indeterminate and circular determinate). Seems like the articles are a bit muddy in their split. There is also a progress indicator page which is more of a stub / disambiguation page today. GoldenStrawberry (talk) 21:50, 25 June 2024 (UTC)