In Mountain Lion’s default setup, I have to scroll-drag in every single window to see if there’s additional content. You can set them to be permanently visible in System Preferences, which I always do, but they’re invisible by default. A user new to the platform, though, would have to discover this fact on their own—and it’s not obvious where to go to change the setting.
The text jon is referenced refers to the scroll bars on the left and/or bottom of every window in Mountain Lion NOT to Safari download progress bars. In Safari 6.0.2 the download indicator appears as a progress bar in a tiny icon at the far right end of Safari's tool bar. With a small download I notice the download finishes and the icon disappears almost before I notice it appeared. Sometimes the download is complete before the animation reaches the dock. I have searched high and low for a preference to return to the progress bar at the bottom of the window without success. I did find a reference to changing the progress bar location in Safari 3 but the notation said the feature was removed in Safari 3.1. There may be a third party extension that I have not found.
If the progress bar is important to you, you might consider changing to another browser.
- Google Chrome shows a download manager tab at the bottom of the screen,
- Camino pops up a download window with a progress bar,
- Firefox works the same way as Camino but its download manager window is much less "colorful" than Safari,
- iCab's popup download manager is text rather than graphics based and IMO is by far the most informative of the bunch,
- Lightning shows download progress textually at the top of the window frame.
Personally Safari 6's progress bar has always worked well for me, but among the others I would probably choose iCab's download manager simply because it is so informative.
Another possible alternative is Easyget Download Manager or Easyget Lite Download Manager from the App Store. Either operates independently of a browser and has the added ability to organize and store downloaded files.
