Web Designers, Please Don't "Animate" Page Titles

If you visit Express Oil Change's web site, everything seems completely ordinary until you leave the tab. That's when the most distracting, broken, annoying example of over-the-top web "design" rears its ugly head.

I'm talking about this scrolling page title. In my tab. Constantly moving from right to left to show me all of the text. It's the only tab that's "moving" or "animated" and it doesn't stop until you return to the tab. It's cheesy and gaudy.

And it's also broken because there are emojis in the page title and the title is obviously being "scrolled" by some script that's moving byte-by-byte, so it scrolls halfway through a multi-byte UTF-8 emoji and for a brief moment there's a glyph error character where a little red car should have been. Bad judgment and bad programming. Worse than that, even if it worked perfectly, it's incredibly annoying.

If you bookmark the tab when it's in the middle of scrolling, you'll bookmark this weird slice of the text that starts or ends in the middle of a word or with a random emoji.

Page titles changing is typically used to notify the user that their action is needed, such as when a file is finished uploading. In this case, since the text is constantly changing, the tab is always in a state of "urgency." Most annoyingly, this causes the browser to highlight the tab when it's pinned. Even if you click the tab and leave it, this notification reappears.

Don't do this. Stop. Get some help. It's distracting. It's the cheesy "web dev" equivalent of retina scan advertising in Minority Report. Just make a site that works and looks half decent without slowing to a halt and stop there please.