Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] qtshark startup time ~1 minute just printing messages

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:25:25 -0700
On 9/9/13 9:58 PM, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> Hello Evan,
> 
> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 09:08:59PM -0400, Evan Huus wrote:
>> It should be fixed in r51914 (see the commit message for more details).
>> Joerg, please let me know if it now works for you (or if you are in fact
>> seeing a different bug).
> 
> Fixed.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Now that it is working, the only question left is: What's the use case for
> this progress bar?

The progress bar lets the user know Wireshark's status during program
initialization. Ideally Wireshark would always start up within a couple
of seconds but that's often not the case.

In the GTK+ code the progress bar is displayed in a splash screen. You'd
have to ask Ulf about the specific design decisions, but as I recall it
was standard UI practice at the time.

For the Qt port I thought it would be useful to display the main welcome
screen as soon as possible. I added a lightbox overlay during startup in
order to disable it in a big and obvious way.

I don't recall a lot of controversy when the splash screen + progress
bar was added in 2004. Why all the fuss now?