Some luxuries of our online lives can be gravely underestimated until you hit some nook or cranny of the World Wide Web that doesn't have them. Take seek bars in videos. Have you ever stopped to think how awesome they are? You can skip forward if you're not interested in what's happening now but would like to check if there's something else down the line in that video. Or you can go back and re-watch what you missed or misunderstood. None of it sounds like an indulgent ask until you open Instagram. The social platform has been averse to such an extravagant feature, but seems to be working on it now.

According to Jane Manchun Wong's latest APK shenanigans, Instagram is testing a seek bar while watching videos. Instead of the countdown that currently shows up in the upper right corner, you can see how far along you are in the video, and — imagine our shock and surprise — drag to fast-forward through the video. Presumably you'd also be able to — gasp! — rewind and watch an already-elapsed part of the video without having to wait for it to finish and restart. Seriously, all that Instagram needs now is a pause button and it'd be catching up with YouTube, circa 2005.

One person already commented on Jane's post saying they have this seek bar in Instagram beta, but our tests spanning over ten different users and devices haven't turned that up, either on beta or stable. It could be a slow-rolling feature, but we're really excited to see it reach more users soon. Everyone deserves to have the Latest Innovation In Online Video Watching™.

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Source: @wongmjane