I think in cases where you are loading significant external data that may take several seconds a loading bar is appropriate; see for example the loading bar on a Youtube video. Perfectly legitimate. Or a loading indicator on a gallery of thumbnails. Appropriate uses.
But the page itself should not necessitate a page wide loading bar. That's a design flaw. Your page is bloated. Even a 768Kbit DSL should be able to load the page itself rapidly. If you're beyond that just for the basic page itself then you've failed in your job as a designer/developer, IMHO.
And I've designed web apps that never actually send you to a different page (just update the DOM), and in my experience they are extremely fast. Even making many API calls retrieving tons of records to a very modest server. That design is not in and of itself a reason to have load bars.
Agreed. The whole point of a client-side update mechanism is to do something better than a loading bar. And that thing should be (1) immediate and (2) particular to what the user did.
But the page itself should not necessitate a page wide loading bar. That's a design flaw. Your page is bloated. Even a 768Kbit DSL should be able to load the page itself rapidly. If you're beyond that just for the basic page itself then you've failed in your job as a designer/developer, IMHO.
And I've designed web apps that never actually send you to a different page (just update the DOM), and in my experience they are extremely fast. Even making many API calls retrieving tons of records to a very modest server. That design is not in and of itself a reason to have load bars.