This is no where near finished but here's some first bits of startup notifications in #phosh (i'm usually using #epiphany on the #librem5 but I needed something that takes longer to start up so i went for #firefox):

@agx @agx Splash screens aren't very useful as they don't communicate anything to the user other than "something happened". We realized this is bad UX in web design decades ago. If it can't be instant, tell the user how long it will take. #ux #uxdesign

@adam Good luck telling the user how long arbitrary code will take to show something useful

@zbrown Anything is better than nothing (which is how it is now). Communicating how long something will take can be done by plain text, a progress bar animation, or progressive loading. Even if the splash screen says "Loading" in plain text, that communicates more of what's going on to the user than a static app icon or throbber does.

@adam well plain text, process bar and progressive loading are all out - phosh simply can't know that

I'm not sure "Loading" adds much

@zbrown Yeah, I don't know anything about the back-end side so that's a shame Phosh is so limited. But from the UX perspective... Which is the best user experience of the following:

- Your spouse leaves without saying anything to you?
- Your spouse puts a orange circular icon on the door and then leaves?
- Your spouse says, "I'm going out to get milk" and then leaves?
- Your spouse says, "I'm going out to get milk and I'll be back in 20 minutes.", leaves, and comes back in 20 minutes?

@adam It's not phosh, it's just how app launching works - you can't do this in shell, KDE, Windows either

Web can do a *bit* better, esp on return visits, but it's still a lot of work and you'll always get an initial blank page and spinner

@zbrown I see informative loading screens when launching programs in Windows every day. Photoshop goes through the whole list of "initializing" or "loading" every piece that it needs before the program is available.