Throbber

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A circle of mostly grey and some black segments, animated to appears as though it is moving clockwise
A typical throbber animation like that seen on many websites when a blocking action is being performed in the background

A throbber, also known as a loading icon, is an

graphical control element used to show that a computer program is performing an action in the background (such as downloading content, conducting intensive calculations or communicating with an external device).[1][2][3] In contrast to a progress bar
, a throbber does not indicate how much of the action has been completed.

Usually the throbber is found at the side of a program's toolbar or menu bar. Throbbers take various forms, but are commonly incorporated into the logo of the program. Throbbers are typically a still image (known as its resting frame), unless the program is performing an action, during which time the throbber is animated in a loop to convey to the user that the program is busy (and has not frozen). Once the action is complete, the throbber returns to its resting frame.

It is normally possible for the user to continue interacting with the program while the throbber animated; one such possibility may be to press a "stop" button to cancel the action. Clicking the throbber itself might perform another action, such as opening the program's website, or pausing or canceling the background action.

History

One of the early (if not the earliest) uses of a throbber occurred in the

web browsers
added a separate Stop button for this purpose.

The Netscape logo, as seen in the top right of the browser window

Netscape, which soon overtook Mosaic as the market-leading web browser, also featured a throbber. In version 1.0 of Netscape, this took the form of a big blue "N" (Netscape's logo at the time). The animation depicted the "N" expanding and contracting – hence the name "throbber". When Netscape unveiled its new logo (a different "N" on top of a hill), they held a competition to find an animation for it. The winning design (featuring the new-look "N" in a meteor shower) became very well known and almost became an unofficial symbol of the World Wide Web.[citation needed] Later, Internet Explorer's blue "e" enjoyed similar status, though it only functioned as a throbber in early versions of the browser.

The

webpage the opportunity to change the look and the animation of the throbber by using proprietary HTML code.[4]
The use of web frames, a feature introduced later, leads WebExplorer to confusion on modern pages due to the way this feature was implemented.

The

command-line option to change the throbber with a local file.[5]

Initially, throbbers tended to be quite large, but they reduced in size along with the size of toolbar buttons as

Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome – place a small annular throbber in the tab while a page is loading and replace it with the favicon
of the page when loading has completed.

Often browsers shipped with

disks
has an AOL throbber instead of the standard "e".

Spinning wheel

See also: Progress indicator
Loading screen in the Telegram app

Throbbers saw a resurgence with

web apps) where an application within the web browser would wait for some operation to complete. Most of these throbbers were known as a "spinning wheel", which typically consist of 8, 10, or 12 part-radial lines or discs arranged in a circle, as if on a clock face
, highlighted in turn as if a wave is moving clockwise around the circle.

In

UNIX operating system and DR-DOS
utilities in the 1980s.

See also
Look up throbber in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Throbbers.

References

  1. ISBN 1888869062
  2. ISBN 1571690948
  3. ISBN 0517886022
  4. ^ Frommert, Hartmut. "OS/2 Web Explorer's proprietary html tags". Archived from the original on 21 December 1996. Retrieved 18 May 2018.
  5. ^ Håkon Wium Lie (13 March 1995). "Arena: Command Line Options". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 6 June 2010.
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