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This question has been asked before by someone else entirely, but basically no solution was given (and this was in 2008). Now, in 2013, HTML and browser functionality has increased, so I thought maybe it's a good idea to ask.

Question: As a developer, how can you make sure that the title of the web page is different from the title of when someone bookmarks your page?

The reason I ask is because there are many websites that have their title, and then some slogan. Or worse, the slogan first and the actual site title after that. In any case, the titles are long, and you want your bookmarks to be concise, preferably one word, right? I want to know if there's any kind of functionality like that available in modern browsers.

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One would have to craft some JS that picks this up — probably similar to how it can be determined when someone uses of “Ctrl + F” on a website — and then briefly changes the title tag, and then back again... –  Baumr Jan 13 '13 at 0:35
If the question has been asked here before, you should try and have its answer corrected or improved, instead of posting a duplicate. –  Jukka K. Korpela Jan 13 '13 at 5:37
Well, I wasn't planning on reviving a very old question, especially since the question was asked for a specific reason (something about SEO names) which I didn't really want to involve in my question. And Baumr: I thought of that, but the trick would only work if someone actually uses Ctrl+D instead of the other ways to set a bookmark, right? –  DaVince Jan 13 '13 at 14:49

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

As far as I can tell for Internet Explorer you can add a link, perhaps in the footer, for your visitors to click and bookmark your site and edit the default title with this function AddFavorite().
Here is a link to it on MSDN. Please notice that this function is deprecated.

See the demonstration of use below:

 <a href="#" 
onclick="window.external.AddFavorite(location.href, 'YOUR_TITLE_HERE'); 
     return false">
Bookmark this!

Although this won't work on other browsers as far as I am aware (surely won't work on Chrome and Firefox) and it's use is abolished when a user decides to bookmark your site manually instead of clicking the link.

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So IE actually had a halfway solution, and it's been deprecated? That's pretty interesting. –  DaVince Jan 13 '13 at 14:50
@DaVince Interesting and useless I guess :) –  Theocharis K. Jan 13 '13 at 15:01

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