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.
![From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!]()
My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...
![9 More Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
With Firefox OS, asm.js, and the push for browser performance improvements, canvas and WebGL technologies are opening a world of possibilities. I featured 9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos and then took it up a level with 9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos, but I want to outdo...
![Dynamically Load Stylesheets Using MooTools 1.2]()
Theming has become a big part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Luckily, so too has a higher regard for semantics and CSS standards. If you build your pages using good XHTML code, changing a CSS file can make your website look completely different.
![Spyjax: Ajax For Evil Using Dojo]()
The idea of Spyjax is nothing new. In pasts posts I've covered how you can spy on your user's history with both MooTools and jQuery. Today we'll cover how to check user history using the Dojo Toolkit.
The HTML
For the sake of this...
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!