updating name windows title

[Nathan Walp]

Etan Reisner wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 11:47:43AM -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
>> What web browser does that? The two browsers I'm using both show the
>> title of the active page (Firefox appends "- Mozilla FIrefox"). This
>> seems better than "Webpages" or "Conversations" would be. Why do you
>> hate it with a fiery passion? (Other, of course, than that you hate
>> *everything* with a fiery passion ;))
>>
>> -s.
> 
> I stand corrected, browsers do tend to append the application name rather
> than the type of item in the window, which I think is even less sensical
> than pidgin prepending or appending the type of item (even in the generic
> case of 'Conversations') for exactly the reasons we pulled 'Gaim' out of
> all of our window titles years ago. It is an absolutely useless piece of
> information under almost all circumstances because you really should know
> what applications you are using.
> 
> Note that that the main argument I can see for appending the browser name
> like that is to identify your web broswer showing 'Investigations into
> Human Computer Interaction Under Water' as opposed to your pdf reader
> showing the accompanying paper for that website. And also note that if the
> browser was not showing the active tab page title in the window title bar
> this wouldn't be an issue. Not to mention the fact that anyone using a
> graphical application switcher will have application icons to be able to
> distinguish between identically named windows of separate applications.
> 
> Now, to step back from the browser bit of things, I think an application
> with one (or many) identical windows does in fact have no reason to
> identify the contents of a window, your web browser will show nothing but
> web pages so titling the dinow 'Webpages' provides no extra information.
> However, in an application that has multiple disjoint window types (like
> pidgin) identifying the contents of the window is in fact useful. Case in
> point the 'IM/Chat' placement option and the IMs and Chats titled windows.
> 
> The compromise position here is 'Conversations - Buddyname' or 'Buddyname
> - Conversations', between those two I don't (really) care as long as we
> use local buddy aliases in the window title.
> 
> To explain why I hate that convention with a passion:
>     It takes up space in my window listings, often doubling the length of
> the entry (I go to lots of pages with short titles).
> 
>     It provides me no useful information, I never need to find my browser
> window by looking in the title for 'Firefox' or 'Opera' if I need to go a
> window like that my window manager lets me go to a window by class name.
> (Though I never even do that because my browser windows always live in the
> same workspace and I can go there directly when necessary.)
> 
>     The fact that the name is appended means that even if I wanted to look
> for the browser name in a window list or taskbar or somesuch, the location
> of that text string is inconsistent and I need to scan from the beginning.
> 
> Those are the reasons I can think of offhand, I feel like I must have more
> but I can't come up with them at the moment.
> 

I believe it is also a tiny bit of security, to prevent some web page 
spoofing a system application.

We clearly do not have such responsibilities, as we don't render content 
that could be used to fool someone.

-Nathan