I’m playing a game and the loading screen shows that the loading is 0% for 10 seconds then jumps to 95% for another 8 seconds, and then the next digits change every second until it reaches 100%.
Computers have been like this forever. Isn’t there a better way to do loading times/completion % so it’s more accurate?
In: 6
Because the progress bar is completely fictional. It’s based on a software developer’s *guess* about how long any particular step in a workflow should take. What’s more, there’s zero stakes in ensuring that the progress bar is accurate, so very rarely are they benchmarked against reality, and the difference in capabilities of varying types of hardware (storage, memory, CPU, system bus, network, etc.) make a one-size-fits-all benchmark virtually impossible.
The actual utility of the progress bar is to demonstrate to the user that the process hasn’t completely seized up.
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