>This seems a little funny to me, since the purpose of the spinner is so that you know the computer isn't caught in a loop — it's "busy". It's true, though, that the computer could still be stuck even though it updates the spinner. This is a hard problem to solve.

The problem that people might assume the computer is stuck in a loop or at any rate that the animation is not going to stop is related to spinner animations on websites. Since the spinner is not a function of the browser, but is instead something implemented in the individual site's code, then stopping the spinner needs to be also coded for and many sites neglect to write the code for "when error happens stop spinner and tell them that things went wrong".

So over time people exposed to negligent website spinners start to suspect any spinner that takes too long.