What do you mean? The SWF progress bars are one of the few that can actually be relied upon. A good example: http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush

The Microsoft installation progress bars are the ones I remember as being ridiculous. Often going backwards, showing ridiculous install times, etc.

I think the worst was Windows movie maker, which used to seem to just randomly choose a time it might take and do a bad job of self correcting on the way. Oh, and of course there's a relevant xkcd, http://xkcd.com/612/

I think this is something slightly different in that it's non-blocking.

The progress bar provides users with feedback as to the current status of the page they have requested to load, but it doesn't get in users' way and the page loads and renders as assets become available (unlike in SWF where all interaction is halted until the entire site has been downloaded up front).

This guy make fun of it in his flash games (progress bars go forward then backward) http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

Brings lots of memories, I used to make flash games in school when I was 15. I always liked those little games. /nostalgia

What have you done...now I'm going to play Winterbells for the rest of the afternoon.

Anddddd there goes my day. Winterbells.

Today I learned that Winterbells is now available on iPhone. What has the world come to?

There aren't JS games close to this yet, right?

Apart from the art, is there any reason you couldn't do this in JS/HTML5?

Is HTML5 audio available on all browsers yet? I remember for Cut the Rope that they claimed that HTML5 audio for games only worked in IE, and that for whatever reason Firefox/Chrome/Safari didn't work quite right and needed a Flash stub.

In theory, yes. But my research indicates that you don't see smooth games like that yet.

I think the problem was that SWFs so frequently needed load indicators. Sure, progress bars make the time seem to go by quicker, but what's better is actually being quicker. Progress bars were a crutch, but the pages were still dramatically slower, that's why we all hated Flash sites so much.

Reminds me of this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/security_theat...

Sadly down now. :(