Question

I’m (ab)using the document title as some kind of a notification area. If the tab/window in question doesn’t have focus at the time I want to notify the user of something, I change the window title to include some notification.

When the window/tab comes back into focus, I want to remove the notification, i.e. reset the title to standard. This resetting, however, sometimes doesn’t work in Chrome.

When I come from a different window, the title gets updated correctly, but when I come from a different tab within the same window, it doesn’t.

I have found a workaround for this (I’ll post it as an answer), but please share any other ideas you might have to fix this.

Answer 1

This appears to be a bug in Chrome regarding the actual redrawing of the tab title, since the document title itself (i.e. within the DOM) is in fact updated correctly.

I suppose that changing the tab (which causes the tab to move to the foreground, hence to be redrawn) and changing the title within the resulting focus event (which also requires a redraw) cause some kind of race condition.

That’s why I tried this workaround, which does in fact work:

window.setTimeout(function () { $(document).attr("title", newtitle); }, 200);

– just wait for a short time before updating the title, so the two redraw events don’t conflict with each other. That’s not pretty, obviously, but a 0.2 second delay shouldn’t usually be a problem.