Minor Chrome bug: improper tab title for Web pages without titles

I continue to try out Google's new Chrome browser. This morning I went to the AAA Daily Fuel Guage Report web site to see how gasoline prices have trended in the past couple of days. (Even though Hurricane Ike is approaching the Gulf, retail gasoline is still declining.) I key in "fuelg" and Chrome promptly displays the full URL, http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/, from my old IE favorities. I press Enter and the page loads fine and looks fine. Except... the browser tab still says "Loading..." I tried it a couple more times, but the same thing happens. Nothing appears to be busy, there is no spinning progress indicator, and the full Web page seems to have been loaded. I tried it in IE and then I notice that IE simply displays the URL in the window title bar. I examined the source for the Web page and notice that there is no <title> tag. Ah ha, that's the source of the problem. Chrome is simply updating the tab title when it sees the <title> tag in the Web page, and has no logic to handle the case of the Web page not having a <title> tag. Bug.

In this case, IE simply uses the URL for the tab title. Hopefully Chrome will eventually improve on that and simply use the core domain name, fuelgaugereport.com, rather than clutter the tab with the unnecessary "http:/www."

Note: I am using IE 7, which does have full support for multi-tabbed browsing. If you do not have tabs in your IE browser, it is probably because you have the older IE 6.

-- Jack Krupansky