IE doesn’t like jQuery’s $(‘title’).text(var);

Changing the title of a web page on the fly can be useful for a bunch of reasons.

Say you’re creating an app using jQuery for example and using a single page to house content which might be different depending on what action a user takes.  (A recent example was an assessment page I was building for a video site.  The user watches a video and then takes an assessment.  The assessment questions vary based on the video they watched, but the format of the quiz is the same, so I decided to use one assessment page for all of the videos and then just change the contents dynamically.  This of course includes the page title.)

So to cut a long story short, doing this in jQuery: ($(‘title’).text(var)) works in most browsers, but IE 7 and 8 throw this beauty of an error:

SCRIPT65535: Unexpected call to method or property access. 
jquery.min.js, line 3 character 32461

Character 32461 refers to this: ‘this.appendChild(a)’.  After some research it appears that a lot of people receive this error from IE for a bunch of different reasons, not just relating to changing the page title dynamically.  To avoid this error just use some straight up JavaScript instead:

document.title = var;