Throbber
A Throbber is a graphic , usually in computer programs (especially for web browsers can be found) and animation indicating that the program performs an action such. B. loading a website or compressing with archiving programs.
The term originated from the English verb to throb ( pulsate , throb ).
This graphic usually shows a program-specific recognition symbol (e.g. the blue e with the diagonal satellite circle in Microsoft's Internet Explorer ), which is often the manufacturer's trademark.
A commonly used throbber symbol, on the other hand, is the so-called spinning wheel ( rotating wheel ), which is used in the Apple Safari , Opera and Mozilla Firefox browsers , the Tango Desktop Project and various (especially Ajax ) web applications . It consists of several lines arranged in a circle, which are highlighted one after the other in the animation in the style of a clockwise moving wave.
The spinning wheel is based on a similar animation in text mode-based programs, in which the characters | / - \ were output at the same cursor position in a recurring sequence (sometimes framed by square brackets as in the following example: Process is running ... [/ ] ) while the application was still busy with a task. Such text-based animations were already found in early versions of UNIX and DR DOS in the 1980s.