Enhancement: Download Progress

[surajsharma]

Currently all downloads are inivisible, a dialog box confirming location pops up but thereafter, we don't get to see the download progress. this is suboptimal and needs to be fixed in some future version.

[PalmerAL]

This would be pretty easy using the setProgressBar API, which I think is supported on all platforms. It would show the progress in the dock (or the equivalent), like this:

[surajsharma]

Not exactly what I meant, but it's something. I was talking about more of a
download manager within the browser, with ability to track progress of
multiple simultaneous downloads.

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 4:27 AM PalmerAL notifications@github.com wrote:

This would be pretty easy using the setProgressBar
http://electron.atom.io/docs/v0.27.0/api/browser-window/#browserwindowsetprogressbarprogress
API, which I think is supported on all platforms. It would show the
progress in the dock (or the equivalent), like this:

[image: screen shot 2016-05-08]
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/10314059/15100880/c8ca422e-1545-11e6-9949-c7b9748e97ad.png

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https://github.com/PalmerAL/min/issues/91#issuecomment-217751286

[ghost]

And what if you're downloading multiple files?

[Pandawan]

Perhaps you could make it either

• Close to how the task list looks like
• A small menu like Safari's
  

And that would be accessible from an icon next to the task list?

[PalmerAL]

I'm not sure more clutter in the tabstrip is a good idea. Maybe something more similar to the Chrome download manager?

[Pandawan]

So like, make the hamburger menu (three bars) do both task and download (kinda like chrome?)

Or make it in one of the file/edit/view... menus

[PalmerAL]

I was thinking about having a bar at the bottom that shows up when you are downloading a file, and shows the download progress. When the file is done downloading, the bar would disappear.

[Pandawan]

Oh that's what you meant! Well that's a good way too! Do whichever one you prefer!

[Tichy]

How about indicating a download in progress with a symbol on the tasks button, and show the details in the task view as a taks named "Downloads"?

This would not add bload and will be consistent with the rest.

[ghost]

Is there a new status on this?

[hmhofman]

@PalmerAL Any news?

[PalmerAL]

@hmhofman It hasn't been a priority recently; we could probably get to it in the next couple releases.

[clayton-grey]

Came by looking for this. Just some way of seeing what downloads are active and their progress would be very welcome. : )

[PalmerAL]

I'm hoping we can do this for 1.9.

If we go with the bottom-bar approach, I think something like this would work:

Clicking on the arrows would give you options to pause/cancel the download, and clicking on the file would open it.

If anyone has opinions on this:

• Does this fit in well with the rest of the interface?
• Would having this show up at the bottom of the screen every time you download something be too distracting?
• Are there other features you would want to see?

I might also make a mockup of having it in the tasks view; I like the idea of not taking up space to show the downloads, but it might also make it harder to find a downloaded file, and having two concepts (downloads and tasks) in the same screen might be confusing.

[Pandawan]

I think that a bottom bar might "break" out of the theme/design though.
I might try and PR one that is similar to the screenshot I sent a while ago (2 years wow) but still keep it in the design of tasks.
But I can't promise anything...

EDIT: nvm, still unsure which one is best...

[PalmerAL]

Yeah, it has been a long time... hopefully this time we'll actually fix it!

I think it might be worthwhile to make some mockups of different concepts first before actually implementing this. In particular, I have a couple of concerns about putting this in the task overlay:

• The overlay will contain two types of data (downloads and tabs), and depending on how this is displayed it would be easy to confuse them.
• When you download something, you might not even realize that the download controls are hidden in the task overlay.
• If you want to open the downloaded file (which I'm guessing is pretty common), it takes multiple actions (open the overlay > scroll through it > click on the download) instead of just being at the bottom of the screen.

However, I agree that it feels like the bottom bar doesn't really fit with the rest of the design. I tried making the bar use the site colors like the navbar does, but that didn't really look any better.

I also considered having some kind of floating bubble near the bottom of the screen with the download, but I'm guessing that covering up content on the page would probably be an issue.

[PalmerAL]

Mockup of how having it in the tasks overlay could look:

I don't think I like this as much, because it hides the downloads where it's harder to get to them, and makes it impossible to monitor download progress while still looking at a webpage, but if you want to download something in the background it would be less distracting.

[Pandawan]

Hmm... Yeah, it doesn't look as good and it would require changing a lot of the design if we wanted to make it "fit in" better. The bottom-bar would probably be better, though I still feel like it somewhat "breaks" the design/theme of simplicity...

EDIT: Perhaps making an entirely new button next to the task view button? Though that might be useless when the user has no downloads (I guess you could hide it until the user downloads something). And it might not look good either...

[clayton-grey]

It could just be a tab that can be opened? Via !downloads or via menu. Could have a preference option to auto-open the tab in background of the current task when you begin a new download.

Edit: To chime in on the shared options, I think the 'Tasks' version fits most with the the minimal ideals of the browser. The downloads section concept presented above makes a lot of sense to me. It's seperate from the tasks, but easily discoverable. The Task view is a kind of nuetral ground to present that info. That said, I think a simple downloads tab also makes sense.

[PalmerAL]

Having a tab hides it even more in the background though, which I'm not sure we want. Generally, we want to hide things you aren't likely to use in order to simplify the UI, but if you're likely to use something, we don't want to make it any more difficult than it needs to be. Typically, when I download a file, I want to be able to glance at the download progress while doing something else, and when the file is done downloading, I want to open it immediately, but maybe this isn't typical. Are you typically downloading larger files? When a file finishes downloading, do you typically open it immediately, or do you wait a bit?

I think it really just depends how likely people are to interact with the download manager. If it's something that you use every time you download a file, I think it makes a lot of sense to put it in the bottom, but if it's something that's used less frequently (such as when you want to check the progress of a particularly large download or cancel a download), it probably does make more sense to put it in the task overlay.

[PalmerAL]

I've implemented a prototype of the download bar here: https://github.com/minbrowser/min/tree/download-manager. Not quite everything works yet (the popup menu, the button to close the bar), but it should be enough to figure out if this is the right approach or not. I ended up simplifying the bar a bit more to make it less distracting:

It still seems a bit more intrusive than I'd like, but I'd like to find out what you think as well. @pandawanfr @clayton-grey (and anyone else who's interested), could you try out that branch and see how well it works for you? (In particular, does it seem distracting if you're trying to do something else with a file downloading in the background?)

[dbfreem]

@PalmerAL I gave this a test on the download-manager branch. I see you had a progress bar it looks like in your screen shot but when I downloaded something on windows I didn't see a progress bar.

[dbfreem]

@PalmerAL I did a little more testing an ran into another issue. Take a look at the screenshot below. Looks like when the text wraps it doesn't display correctly.

See screenshot

[PalmerAL]

@dbfreem Thanks for pointing that out! It should be fixed in 8a3ecf1.

I'm guessing the first issue is related to the second one, since the title is taking up the space where the progress bar would normally be - could you see if that's fixed now as well?

[dbfreem]

@PalmerAL looks like the wrapping is fixed but the progress bar still isn't there.

[PalmerAL]

OK, it is a different issue, should be fixed in 0f40e2c.

[dbfreem]

That fixed it :)

[PalmerAL]

I've opened a PR for this here: #671.

[PalmerAL]

I've merged #671; while this isn't the perfect solution, I think it's a good balance between being minimalistic and being easy to use. A lot of this code is reusable, so if we decide to move download information to the task overlay later, it shouldn't require too many changes to do that.