Change Tab Title with JavaScript

By  on  

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.

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Buttons with the Dojo Toolkit

    I love that JavaScript toolkits make enhancing web pages incredibly easy. Today I'll cover an effect that I've already coded with MooTools: creating a Twitter-style animated "Sign In" button. Check out this five minute tutorial so you can take your static...

  • By
    Create a Context Menu with Dojo and Dijit

    Context menus, used in the right type of web application, can be invaluable.  They provide shortcut methods to different functionality within the application and, with just a right click, they are readily available.  Dojo's Dijit frameworks provides an easy way to create stylish, flexible context...

Discussion

  1. 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!

  2. If you want to be evil about it change it to:

    document.title = '(3) mytitle'; 
    

    And see how many people wonder what is unread :)

    • If that’s not in evil.js, it should be added immediately

    • Matthew

      Thats pure evil.

  3. Loilo

    That’s really nice – I always did that via getElementsByTagName and innerHTML, but this solution’s way more convenient.

  4. Of-course this is tricky. It also affects DOM document ( element in HTML). Also In XUL, retrieving document.title before document gets completely loaded has unfixed behavior (document.title might pull an empty result or may effect-less.)

  5. 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.

  6. This is such a simple tweak and can make us look our website state of the art!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!