The Slowest Loading Bar in the World

A loading bar that takes a year, explained as far as it goes

This bar started at zero on the first of January and it will reach one hundred as the thirty-first of December ends. Nothing you do makes it faster. There is no queue to join, nothing to click, and refreshing achieves precisely what refreshing usually achieves, which is nothing at all. It is the least interactive page on this site by a wide margin and that is the entire design.

People ask what it is loading. That is not a question this page answers, and it never will be. Everything else about it is documented below in more detail than anyone needs.

Everyone sees the same number

The figure is computed from Coordinated Universal Time rather than your own clock. That distinction is the point rather than a technicality: if the bar ran on local time, a reader in Auckland would be most of a day ahead of one in Los Angeles, and the number on screen would be a private fact rather than a shared one. On UTC there is exactly one correct answer at any instant, and everybody looking at this page anywhere on Earth is looking at it.

That makes the bar a genuinely communal object, which is a strange thing for a page with no comments, no accounts and no way to see anyone else. You cannot tell that other people are watching. You just know that if they are, they are seeing this.

The arithmetic, since it is the only thing here to look at

The year is measured from midnight UTC on the first of January to midnight UTC on the first of the following January, and the position is simply how far through that span the current moment falls. Nothing is rounded to days and nothing assumes a year is three hundred and sixty-five of them: the span is computed from the two boundaries, so a leap year is longer and the bar moves correspondingly slower through it without anybody having to special-case February.

The readout carries six decimal places, which is more than it sounds. One millionth of one percent of a year is a bit over three hundred milliseconds, so the final digit changes about three times a second. That is fast enough to see and slow enough to read, which took a little choosing: five decimals is nearly motionless and seven is an unreadable blur.

It is worth sitting with the ratio for a second. The last digit ticks three times a second, and the first digit changes about ten times a year. The same bar contains both of those facts.

Why every loading bar you have ever seen was lying

Real progress bars almost never show progress. They show an estimate, usually derived from something that correlates badly with the work remaining, and the estimate is revised as the work turns out to be harder or easier than assumed. That is why they stall at ninety-nine percent, why they leap from thirty to eighty, and why the remaining time so often goes up. The bar is not measuring the job. It is guessing.

This one does not guess. It is a division problem with two known quantities, and it is exactly as accurate at the start as it is at the end. Whatever else can be said about the page, the number is completely honest, which is more than can be said for almost any other progress indicator you will use today.

Milestones

Six moments are marked: ten, twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, ninety and one hundred percent. Each falls at a fixed instant in UTC, the same for everybody, and the page counts down to the next one. Fifty percent lands in the small hours of the second of July, which is a fact almost nobody has ever needed.

If a milestone happens while you have the page open, you will know. If it does not, the countdown tells you how long you would have to wait, and the honest answer is usually months. Very few people will ever watch one arrive. That is part of why it is worth doing.

The certificate

Because the number is never the same twice, a screenshot of it is already unique. The certificate makes that portable: an image with the reading and the date on it, drawn in your browser, which you can keep or post or ignore. Nothing is uploaded to make it and nothing about your visit is recorded anywhere.

What happens at one hundred percent

It reaches one hundred, and then the year rolls over and it is at zero again. There is no completion screen, no reward and nothing to collect. The bar has been at one hundred percent before and it will be again, and being there for it is the whole of what there is to be there for.

This is, admittedly, the least you have ever been offered by a web page. It is also completely reliable, which very few things are. It will be here next year at the same rate, doing the same division, refusing the same question.