Change Tab Title with JavaScript
Changing the tab (or window) title is an age old practice. Gmail does it to notify the user of a new chat message and this blog does it to update the tab title after a new page loads via AJAX. How is it done? By setting a property on the document object, of course:
That property, of course, is document.title:
document.title = 'Hello!'; // New title :)
One common misconception is that you change the window.title property, but you must use the document object, otherwise you'll see no effect. You'll oftentimes see a setInterval used with document.title to quickly change title to get the user's attention.
![Create a Sheen Logo Effect with CSS]()
I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post. The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome. When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo. Using two HTML elements and...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Sexy Album Art with MooTools or jQuery]()
The way that album information displays is usually insanely boring. Music is supposed to be fun and moving, right? Luckily MooTools and jQuery allow us to communicate that creativity on the web.
The XHTML
A few structure DIVs and the album information.
The CSS
The CSS...
![HTML5 Datalist]()
One of the most used JavaScript widgets over the past decade has been the text box autocomplete widget. Every JavaScript framework has their own autocomplete widget and many of them have become quite advanced. Much like the placeholder attribute's introduction to markup, a frequently used...
This is great – in 15 years of working in web design the thought of changing page title never crossed my mind. Could be useful though, cheers!
If you want to be evil about it change it to:
And see how many people wonder what is unread :)
If that’s not in evil.js, it should be added immediately
Thats pure evil.
That’s really nice – I always did that via
getElementsByTagNameandinnerHTML, but this solution’s way more convenient.Of-course this is tricky. It also affects DOM document ( element in HTML). Also In XUL, retrieving
document.titlebefore document gets completely loaded has unfixed behavior (document.titlemight pull an empty result or may effect-less.)I’m happy to be corrected on this, but if you change the tab title after a screen reader initially caches the page, they are not informed of this change. So, if you are changing the page for a relevant reason, could this be a problem? The page title is the first thing screen readers hear when a page loads, and it is like a road map to where they are, where they want to be.
This is such a simple tweak and can make us look our website state of the art!