Friday, 21 September 2012

Safari censors "Google" in tab titles


Safari likes to censor Google. For some reason they do not want you to see that name in the title of your tab. Or could it be just a bug in their code? I doubt it.


I am running Safari 6.0 (7536.25) on OS X 10.7.5, and have noticed this strange effect.

If the title of the web page you are viewing begins with "Google", and is too long to fit in the tab, then Safari will truncate the title so that it begins with the next word after "Google".

Any other time the title is too long, the tab title is still set to the first few words of the title.

The following gallery displays this effect. In images 2, 6 and 9, the tab title should begin with Google, but it has been cut off. All the other tab titles display 'correctly', regardless of how long they are.


This doesn't happen with any other word, or title, independent of the length of the title. I have tried it with "Microsoft", and "Samsung", and they both still appear in the tab title.

This probably seems petty and insignificant, but Apple has been known to behave pettily, and seems like something they would do.

I haven't tried to see what happens if "Google" is the second word of the title, or if this censorship happens with anything else. Over to you. Comment away.