Feature request

[Andrew Abernathy]

On Monday, December 17, 2001, at 06:20  AM, Pascal Lessard wrote:

> Leonard Case a écrit, le 17/12/2001 :
>
>> There was a floating progress bar, but it wasn't translucent and 
>> therefore interfered with people's ability to read the top right of a 
>> page as it was loading. This caused complaints and so we changed it.
[...]
> 	A good idea for 4.2 or 5.0... but then again, why couldn't it be a 
> floating bar ??? (You don't need it, it's not there. You need it, it's 
> unobstrusively there.)

Unfortunately, if a web page is split horizontally with frames, the 
floating bar provides an extremely problematic user experience. (We 
experimented with this idea a long time ago - on the surface, it seems 
great, but in reality it just didn't work.)

The old floating status bar got dumped because it kept getting in the 
way. It was in fact partially transparent, but was often distracting (it 
had to resize horizontally depending on the content) and was not 
click-thru, so could be extremely irritating if it happened to be over 
something you wanted to see clearly or click on - the location did not 
allow for scrolling the page to move what you were interested in out 
from under the status bar. It might fare better in a different location, 
but we went in the current direction instead.

-andrew