With the introduction of and FF4 and IE9, page titles now get truncated to about 25-30 characters because of the width of the page tabs and because the title bar no longer shows. This means that long titles are now meaningless and are never seen. Will this affect people’s browsing habits and will Google start truncating titles longer than 25 characters?
Fotiman
1:44 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
The titles could still be seen if the user bookmarks a site. The title is the default value used to identify the bookmark.
JohnKing1
2:11 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
I think that it will mean the end of long titles. People rarely bookmark webpages just to see what the longer title is.
engine
7:43 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
Mouse over the tab and you see the title. In addition, the title is used by search engines and is indexed.
Stay with it.
brotherhood of LAN
7:49 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)
Yeah I think even though the titles in tabs are truncated, they're more of a visual cue than a definitive description. As engine says, a mouseover will show the full title.
I try to keep less than 10 tabs open and can remember why each tab is open by looking at the tab. Never understood how people who can have 50 tabs open ;o)
jalarie
6:53 pm on Mar 31, 2011 (gmt 0)
Opera 10.10 truncates the tab version of the title of this page to about half of what is currently in the title bar. I think losing the title bar is a bit of a pain. Can it be turned on in the options?
JohnKing1
2:06 am on Apr 1, 2011 (gmt 0)
And who bothers to hover over the tab bar just to see the title of the page? Long titles are dead.
[edited by: JohnKing1 at 2:24 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2011]
jalarie
2:17 am on Apr 1, 2011 (gmt 0)
Do FF4 and IE9 have the option to enable the title bar?
JohnKing1
2:32 am on Apr 1, 2011 (gmt 0)
FF4 does, I can't see it in IE9.
brotherhood of LAN
2:34 am on Apr 1, 2011 (gmt 0)
will Google start truncating titles longer than 25 characters
I would say no, it really depends on the angle. 1) How much of the title they display in the SERPs 2) How it weights title words in its algorithm
I'd say for 1) the title is still very important and pretty much the same for 2)... the <title> tag is like the first and last breath of what a document is about.
MarketingVictory
7:16 pm on May 12, 2011 (gmt 0)
Simply move your mouse close to the x box to exit FF, right click and select menu bar. Voila, there it is!
lucy24
8:15 pm on May 12, 2011 (gmt 0)
Even bookmarks aren't infinitely long. Mine cut out around 40. (The system uses a non-monospaced font so it probably goes by physical length. Page titles loaded down with ells and eyes could be longer.) They're also truncated in the Edit Bookmarks area.
This is a subject dear to my heart because I deal with an entity that thinks all its pages should be named in the form (details changed to protect the guilty)
"The webmasterworld archived article on the subject you're interested in"
with-- by actual count-- 31 non-unique characters before you get to the significant part of the title. So if the user has multiple pages open from the same site, all they see for any of them is "The webmasterworld archived ..." Not useful.
:: insert boilerplate about how you're dealing with humans who, almost by definition, know less about this stuff than you do ::
