On a workstation install of Florence my progress meter showing the progress of the format didn't show anything. However from that point on worked fine.
Assigning to a developer.
I saw this also, but ONLY when I shose to check for bad blocks. In fact, it did appear that the progress meter worked, but only during the actual formatting phase, and then it was so fast (in comparison to the bad block check) it seemed to be broken.
The progress meter is an approximation at best. Because the writes are cached, it's tough to get it much better then it is w/o slowing down the formatting step significantly.