Small things: Google Chrome page titles

23 July 2009
Small things: Google Chrome page titles

Welcome to the small things, covering the small things in the area of user interfaces that without no apparent reason (at least usually), one way or another hinder the user experience.

Todays receipe: Google Chrome + lots of open tabs + missing title bar

I’m a power user of tabs (like everyone who has seen any of my browser windows open knows), which means that many times in a day, all of my tabs are so small that only the first letter of the page title is shown, like so:

Now, you would get the same kind problem with any browser, but that is not the problem I’m referring to. The problem becomes evident when you are say, reading a longer article and you want to check what was the title of the article, or have lots of pages open from the same site and have to distinguish the difference between them. Normally (Firefox, IE and whatnot) you would just glance the title bar of the window and be done with it, this method however doesn’t work with Google Chrome since it’s lacking the title bar. What you have to do in Chrome is you either look around the page, to find a clue about the title of the page or hover the mouse pointer over the tab for few seconds, until the title appears as a tooltip.

So, consider this: 98% of the time the URL in the addressbox (was it called OmniBox even?) is less than one third of the available space. What if that free space would be used for displaying the title of the page, thus enabling users to distinguish between two pages faster and more effectively.

Of course proper design would be needed to distinguish between the address and the title and the issue of longer titles would be solved but the basic idea is there. And the longer titles or URL’s aren’t even that complicated; just truncate the title and/or the URL and when clicked, display and maybe even select the whole text (for easy copy-paste), click somewhere else would return the addresbar to the normal, truncated, mode.