I’m working on an iphone app that needs 650kb of json data to get started, so I needed a bit of progress display while the data is being fetched. This works on mobile webkit:

interval = null
  
$.ajax {
  url : "endpoint.json"

  dataType : 'json'

  xhr : () =>
    xhr = jQuery.ajaxSettings.xhr()
  
    interval = setInterval( =>
      if xhr.readyState > 2
        total = parseInt(xhr.getResponseHeader('Content-length'))
        completed = parseInt(xhr.responseText.length)
        percentage = (100.0 / total * completed).toFixed(2)
      
        console.log "Completed #{percentage}%"
    , 50)
  
    xhr

  complete: ->
    clearInterval(interval)
  
  success : (data) =>
    alert(data)
}

It’s a bit painful because of the way you access the raw xhr object in jQuery 1.5, but works nicely. I then store the data in localStorage (as a bit json blob) and we’re away.