I figured out a workaround to #1 (popup) which you can see at this link: Is pre-loading hidden elements possible? - #4 by ed727
On #2 (page loading time), things are better since I went through some steps to lighten up pages. In general that’s really important – do everything you can to streamline the page.
Unfortunately I didn’t figure anything out beyond that. Spinners on workflows especially can be frustrating because even if you start a spinner at the beginning of a worfklow and close it at the end of a series of steps, it doesn’t necessarily work that way since Bubble seems to fire off a bunch of steps all at once.
I do have a “fake” spinner that’s set to show for a few seconds, to let a user know a workflow is executing, and to chill out. But it’s not “real” in that it’s not actually set based on the beginning and end point of the process.
On workflows, I’m also getting more comfortable with backend worfklows and moving them to the backend where relevant. That makes things quicker since it takes the processing off the page and sends it over to Bubble to do.
Generally I ran across a lot of information on various options to make a spinner or progress bar – but that’s the easy part – the hard part is getting them to work.