Throbber

A throbber is a graphic that with computer programs (especially with web browsers ) usually found and displays through animation that the program performs an action, such as loading a web page or compressing in archiving programs.

The term originated from the English verb to throb ( pulsate, throb ).

This illustration is usually program specific recognition symbol to see ( for example, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the blue 'e' with the diagonal satellites circle), so often the hallmark of the manufacturer.

A common technique used throbber icon, however, is the so-called Spinning Wheel ( rotating wheel ), which (especially Ajax ) Web applications used in the browsers Safari, Opera and Mozilla Firefox, the Tango Desktop Project and various. It consists of several arranged in a circular lines that are highlighted in the animation one after another in the style of a moving clockwise shaft.

The spinning wheel goes back to a similar animation in text mode -based programs in which, in recurrent episode the characters | / - \ were issued to the same cursor position (sometimes surrounded by square brackets, as in the following example: in progress ... [/ ] ), while the application was still busy with a task. Such text-based animations were to be found in early versions of UNIX and DR DOS in the 1980s.