Apple Update Now Available for Download

I didn't care for that article, Jon...neither funny nor good satire, and I'm sad to say that neither the article nor the cartoons I saw are up to the standards of The New Yorker I read years ago.

I'm disappointed by that, but thanks for the link to this fascinating article.

I dunno... I got a few chuckles out of it, such as: "Download time is approximately twelve minutes, and by “approximately” we mean probably an hour."

I can't count the number of times I've looked at a dialogue box that stated "About one minute" ten or fifteen minutes after the first time it came up.

Someone who is working on his Masters in programming told me an interesting story about estimated times. He said that programmers build in a time to report, regardless of accuracy, so that the enduser will think that something is happening, and not bail out.

I just installed El Capitan on a friend's computer (upgrade from Lion) and I can believe this. The screen stalled at "31 minutes remaining" for about 10 minutes, then went to "30 minutes" for an interminable time, etc. Finally, of course, the installation completed itself.

If you have ever downloaded something (the current utility OnyX comes to mind) that does not have a meaningful progress bar (either a time countdown or a megabyte countup) you will appreciate even "meaningless" time remaining indicators. I get left with a feeling of being in limbo when there is no indicator.

There are two things here.

1. Progress bars and
2. time estimates

When you download files like OnyX there is a always a download progress bar. You just have to know where to look for it. It can be found in two different places

• In the Dock, below the download folder icon
• in the download folder on the icon of the file that is being downloaded.

Download time estimates reported by for example the OS X installer/updater are exactly that estimates and are subject to an almost ridiculous number of factors many of which cannot be accurately estimated and others which can change over the course of a large download.

Installation time estimates have long been notoriously inaccurate. We might be best served by an install progress bar without any time estimates, but even those are subject to inexplicable and confusing pausing and uneven progression.

Three with Safari...in its command-option-L pane. (I think Firefox has a similar pane.)

I've found that Apple's "minutes left" progress bar just needs interpretation. For example, when it says "One Minute Remaining", I read that as: "You have time to take your dog to the park and throw the ball around for her."

That combo produces no results for me in Safari 9.0. However, there is a Finder command-option-L command, which opens a Finder window to the same Downloads folder joemikeb referred to above.

When I'm d/l'ing in Safari 9.0.3 I get a down-arrow icon in the top right corner of my window, and hitting command-option-L generates a drop-down that shows a progress bar, my x MBs of n MBs progress, and my d/l speed.

Edit: I'll guess that you didn't get any results because you weren't d/l'ing when you tried, kinda like the command showing an empty folder in Finder if you're not d/l'ing when you hit it.

Edit 2: Bad nomenclature for a change; it's not a pane, which is probably why it doesn't appear if no d/l is in progress.

Wow! Has this thread ever changed direction.

Is a new one in order?

You don’t need to be actually downloading anything, but you have to have something in that Downloads list for it to show up with Command-Option-L. After you clear that list, the tell-tale down-arrow icon in the top right corner of your Safari windows vanishes, and Command-Option-L won’t do anything. This behavior is consistent with Apple’s view of Mac OS X’s condition dependent interface.

Perhaps, but not quite yet. IMHO, so far the thread’s meandering around an update ’available’ (for download) is rather natural. As soon as an issue not strictly covered by the title really takes off, it’s time to consider detaching it. Then the Mod in question has to figure how to do that in a way that does justice to the new thread's provenance, and that makes sense to the reader. We'll see.

I specifically picked OnyX as an example because, while it's download has a progress bar, it is a completely filled "barber pole" style that provides no progress information, just a spinning pole, no progress of any kind. The same is true of the Safari progress bar (upper right corner of the main window)—it shows no progress or time estimates for OnyX.

Now that is curious, for my experience doesn’t match yours. Running Safari 9.0.3 on a 2014 retina iMac under Yosemite, I do see progress in Safari’s Downloads icon when downloading OnyX. That said, a gradually filling download bar is indeed not always present; in some cases (but not with my OnyX test) the progress bar is entirely filled (solid blue, no barberpole) for the duration of the download, while the file size in the Downloads list is indicated with a question mark. I suspect the issue is with information the server makes available or not (properly), as the case may be. I wonder if the barberpole phenomenon is something similar.

With Google Chrome, when downloading anything, there is no immediately visible progress bar. All that shows is a "status" in the lower left hand corner, showing how many Mbs have been downloaded. How long that takes depends on numerous factors, but I just let it be, open another window in Chrome, and continue my surfing of the net.

In El Cap/Safari 9.0.3 on my 2010 MBP I see a filled, pulsing blue d/l bar with a question mark indicating unknown file size when I d/l OnyX.

I wonder if your filled progress bar is the result of a third party extension or plugin. My experience matches Alternaut's.

I disabled my plug-ins, by changing the name of /Library/Internet Plug-Ins, and my extensions, via Safari > Develop, with no change to the filled progress bar.

Edit: /Users/artie/Library/Internet Plug-Ins is empty.

As some server variable(s) may underlie the differences we see, knowing which server we use becomes important. I made my observations when downloading OnyX from Titanium Software’s website.

I see the same thing regardless of whether I d/l from MacUpdate or Titanium.

I now have five copies of OnyX in my download folder and I still cannot replicate your "filled" progress bar. But then I have always thought of you as unique.

While some may do that, I tend to take one of two approaches.

Approach 1 is a dumb average. record start time. periodically calculate average speed by (amount downloaded / time spent thus far downloading). Multiply against remaining size. Calculate remaining time based on (remaining space / average speed) This is the easiest thing to do, but doesn't react well to changes in network speed. If you were downloading at 1MB/sec and suddenly your line became congested and now you are downloading at 50KB/sec, the average download speed will remain far above your current speed, and will continuously tell you "we're almost done". Some ISPs will give transfers a high "initial burst speed" so you can get small stuff fast. But if it sees you sucking on something for awhile, it'll throttle you down so others get their little stuff faster, figuring you might be at it for awhile and they'd rather lag one big download than a hundred little ones.

Approach 2 is a running average. Instead of recording initial start time, the start time of the last window is recorded, along with the current download progress. The next sample may be taken only one second later. The amount downloaded in that time and the time that elapsed are used to calculate spontaneous speed. This speed is placed in the end of a circular queue, that may encompass say 20 seconds. (20 samples at 1 per second, or 40 samples at one every 1/2 second, etc) The queue is then averaged, and that is the speed that is then divided by the remaining data to download, to generate an estimate of remaining time. You can see this is quite a bit more complicated, but it will react quickly to changes in download speed, and it will fully correct in the time it takes to make one run around the queue. (20 seconds in this case) Shorter queues improve reaction time but can be unnecessarily sensitive to small hiccups in speed.

As the download gets very close to completing, both approaches tend to become very accurate. Transfers that vary wildly in speed (up, down, up, down) will produce rollercoaster estimates using approach 2, but will be fairly smooth and accurate using approach 1. So your specific conditions will determine which approach ends up giving the most accurate numbers through the bulk of the download. To this end, I sometimes implement a hybrid. I take BOTH approaches, and use an average of approach 1 and 2's speeds to divide remaining time. This seems to be the best practical approach if you are willing to deal with the added complexity of approach 2. It doesn't swing too wildly if conditions are all over the map, but it provides more accurate estimates mid-download if speeds make a change for the better or worse. Weighted averages of 1 and 2 are also possible, taking 1 less into account and 2 more into account as the download approaches the end.

It's actually a fairly interesting problem to work on.

I actually think we are in agreement on what we see. My barber pole reference is to what OnyX shows in its own application when it is doing the download. I see the same as you have described in Safari's download window. This is also a 2014 retina iMac, but under El Capitan.

Here's what I see on three d/l sites in Safari and on the same three sites in Firefox.

The Firefox MacUpdate d/l is the only one with an unfilled progress bar, and that's because it's not OnyX...it's an MU installer. (Note the title and d/l size. I tried twice - left the site and returned - with the same results.)

Food for thought... Why does MU automatically give me OnyX itself in Safari while it also automatically gives me the installer in Firefox?

Slightly off-topic, but notable...


I'll guess that's Titanium Software's reaction to CNet's malware d/l's, which leaves me wondering how they feel about MU's over-endowed "installer".

Edit: These are my installed plug-ins; could one of them be at the root of this?

You contradicted yourself there.

We have been discussing Apples and Oranges again. In my original post I specifically referred to the download bar in the Dock and on the icon in the Download folder. I customized the Safari tool bar and do not have the download icon on it so I was unclear what you were talking about.

That said, I installed the download icon and once again downloaded OnyX from the Titanium website. Downloading the 34.8MB OnyX dmg took approximately 1 second or less (I enjoy very high download speeds from Charter Cable) so it was very difficult to ascertain when the bar was filled in but it did appear to progress from left to right.

I ftp'd a 124.2MB file from another site that has a much slower server and the progress bar on the Safari tool bar, the Dock, and the dmg icon in the download folder all three dutifully and visibly progressed from left to right properly indicating the download progress.

I will leave the interpretation of my results to you.

You did that in post #38616, but I immediately responded in post #38630


and the rest of this thread has followed from that post, including your having picked up on it in post #38656