Why do browsers not have a file upload progress bar?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/235284
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I wonder why no browser out there has such simple but essential feature. Am I missing something? Is there a technical reason?
I'm tired of all those javascript/flash/java hacks out there ...
Solution
There is no technical reason preventing the browser from calculating the total bytes to be sent and then tracking how many have been received by the server (Thanks, Kibbee for your comment). Firefox had a functional upload progress indicator until version 0.9, but that build broke it in 2004.
Reading through the Bugzilla updates, it seems that this feature doesn't seem to benefit enough users to get any traction from the developers.
Users who regularly upload very large files tend to use tools like FTP that are designed for this purpose, so they are not affected.
OTHER TIPS
Adding to flamingLogos argument, you might operate behind a proxy which takes your five megabytes of pure goodness within a second, and then sends it off to the server over a 56kbit modem.
I perceive a wrong progress bar slightly worse than no progress bar at all, and there would be many people for who it would be wrong all of the time.
Yes, it's silly, and for some reason browser makers are ignoring it. I would strongly dispute that large file users use FTP - hardly anyone knows about that anymore and all the common Web apps require HTTP uploads for video, audio and pictures (e.g. youtube).
Ironic that user participation and media is the key to Web 2.0, yet the main mechanism for user participation is so poorly handled by browsers.
For Firefox there have been bugs languishing for years, such as for a better upload progress display: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
Get voting! :)
The existing progress bar in the status bar is broken for years - see bug 249338 - and it will let you silently abort an upload - see bug 432768.
If you are using Firefox, you can use the new UploadProgress add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/221510/ designed for this purpose, that is displaying the progress of your uploads and an estimated remaining time.
You have to post back to upload a file, regardless of whether or not you are being "sneaky" about it (using hidden iframes, for example); the browser's own progress bar (usually down in the status bar) is the file upload progress bar in that sense, although not exactly.
It's just that you can't easily use that data for yourself, so you have to approximate it with a lot of client-to-server communication tricks.
There's no real technical reason you couldn't have a reasonable progress indicator as you do with downloads. You should suggest it as a feature request to your favorite browser.
That said, I think the main reason there are so many javascript/flash/ajax-based upload components isn't so much to provide progress bars (though that's a nice bonus). It's usually because they want to provide a better UI for selecting the data to be uploaded and to sometimes manipulate the data before uploading. The basic file upload feature that's in the HTML specs results in the "Browse..." button that pops up a file open dialog and uploads the raw file data as is to the server.
The web browser has always been that, a browser of the web. It is a mechanism for consumption. Our ability to upload information through the same portal is somewhat of a hack.
