When Opera flashes the progress bar incessantly and inappropriately

This one has been around for as long as I can remember, and I'm finally posting here to see if anyone knows why it's happening only in Opera and whether it's something they can fix/change.

There are many sites that exhibit this behavior, and it's certainly related to Javascript, since it does not occur when JS is disabled.

Here's a good example site (home page or articles):
http://www.slate.com

Wait for the page to finish loading. Now notice that every X seconds, the progress bar appears (unless you have it disabled, of course). If you have the pop-up progress bar, it's especially annoying.

It doesn't even happen in coincidence with anything else moving on the page.

Looking at network activity with Dragonfly, you can see http://api.echoenabled.com pulsing away. Yes, I can block that in urlfilter.ini (and I have) to workaround the problem, but this problem occurs on a subset of other sites I frequent too, and who's to say what the culprit is on each of those. I can't be hunting these down on all those sites and/or disable JS for them, which breaks the sites in some cases.

So, in the end: why is Opera doing this? No other browser does, and the same communications are occurring with them (I looked, for example, with Chrome's dev tools).

Yes, I think that is the same issue. Thanks for pointing it out. I would have posted there, but "activity" is misspelled in the subject (though I'm not sure now if that's one of the searches I made).

Anyway, yes, it's providing more information, but I think Opera's on the wrong side of a sensible limit here, and Opera is the only browser that does this. More information doesn't equate with useful information. One user in the other thread says that this is "indicating progress of Ajax queries from scripts taking place on a page" -- that's the sort of thing one uses Dragonfly for. It's available there for those who want it.

The example I gave of api.echoenabled.com (and api.js-kit.com, which I didn't mention but which seems to often go in tandem with echoenabled and is required to tame www.slate.com, www.washingtonpost.com, and other sites) is basically getting pinged every few seconds. Nothing is changing on the page; it's not reloading; network activity is basically zero (therefore of no material interest), there's nothing new for the user to notice by virtue of this activity. It causes the mouse cursor to animate, even when you're on different pages. Very bad.

I see what you described at http://www.slate.com and in Dragonfly, and I see similar activity on lots of sites.

I'm no expert on this, but thought I might just mention this post and my later post in the same thread.

Is that getting at the same issue? If so, it seems to me that Opera is simply providing more information about ongoing activity than some other browsers do.

But I don't know if it is potentially useful information in some particular way, and I wonder if there's ever been a proposal of some kind of user control over which kind of events are monitored in the progress bar. But it seems that would require some way to classify events for display or no-display, and I don't know enough about the coding issues to know if that is feasible.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I've pretty much habituated to the progress bar activity, but I can see how it might be very distracting for some. (I actually find it more intrusive and distracting when K-Meleon flashes information in the tab while I'm reading the tab label, so I prefer it to be in the address bar or on the status bar.)

Originally posted by rseiler:

that's the sort of thing one uses Dragonfly for. It's available there for those who want it.

That seems to me like a sensible way to think about it. As I mentioned, I've just thought about it as additional info, but I haven't been aware of any particular value it might have for me, a fairly well-informed non-programmer (who is only interested in it out of self-educational curiosity), let alone for the average user.