Why is Chrome inconsistent about showing Upload Progress?

Sometimes when I'm uploading a file in Chrome, a small status bar message appears on the bottom left of the window, saying Uploading 23%... and so on, until the upload is finished. But sometimes this doesn't show up at all -- usually when I'm uploading larger files on a somewhat slower connection.

It looks like someone else already asked this same question on Google's Product Forums, but the only reply demonstrated a lack of understanding the original question.

It's really annoying that this sometimes, unexpectedly, doesn't show up. Particularly on large files, because large files are the ones you really want to measure the progress of. Has anyone else run into this bug? Are there any workarounds or settings to ensure that upload progress is always visible?

Solution 1:

Short answer: it is most likely a bug, because the browser has full knowledge about the total upload size and the amount already sent.

I can think of 3 excuses the product managers at Google could come up with:

• If a particular site uses an exotic front end library that sends of data in chunks, that hides the total amount of bytes of an upload from the browser. The browser should still see intermediate totals and would be able to show a (misleading) percentage of that.

• Another psychological obstacle might be proxy servers, usually found in companies and universities. These may accept the traffic faster than they are able to send it out. This situation would yield a progress percentage racing to 100, then pausing.

• Many sites keep persistent connections to a server open via JavaScript. This could look like an upload to Chrome. Real uploads could be wrongly classified as such a persistent connection.