Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure Github does this when navigating from page to page. Makes sense—The browser has no way of knowing the progress of the HTTP request.

It seems to me that most progress bars are lies.

Usually by the time your software knows fully all the things that need to be done, then you are almost done anyway.

One approach is to remember how long a similar task took, and present progress based on the expected time will be similar.