The HTML5 spec (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-title-element) states: User agents should use the document's title when referring to the document in their user interface. When the contents of a title element are used in this way, the directionality of that title element should be used to set the directionality of the document's title in the user interface. In addition, http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#text-rendered-in-native-user-interfaces requires text from elements generally to be rendered in native user interfaces in a manner that honors the directionality of the element from which the text was obtained, mentioning dialogs, title bars, pop-up menus, and tooltips as particular examples. Currently, unfortunately, the directionality in which page titles are displayed depends entirely on the OS. As a result, a page with dir=rtl on the html element and a Hebrew title meant to look like this: CSS-ו HTML מדריכים על actually results in a title that looks like this (on English Windows 7): מדריכים על HTML ו-CSS and is, as a result, unreadable. RTL sites that care about how their title looks are therefore forced to do one of the following: 1. avoid titles starting with a number, ending with punctuation, or mixing LTR and RTL text (which is sometimes impossible), or 2. use the invisible RLE and PDF formatting characters in the title, which were not designed to be used by mere mortals, or 3. pre-garble the title as I have done above, ordering the characters logically in such a way that the intended visual ordering results, at the cost of a garbled logical order - and a garbled display on an OS that uses a different directionality. Fixing this bug will not affect titles that fall in case 1 or 2. It will garble titles of case 3, but they did not have a consistent display anyway.

What is the scope of this bug? Bug 347502 is the same issue, but with specific reference to tab titles. Tooltips were fixed in bug 91312.

The scope is the page title, whether displayed as a tab title or as the window title (and from there to other OS places, e.g. the Task Manager's Applications list in Windows), or whatever. The reference to the spec section that also speaks of dialogs, tooltips, etc, did not mean to include those other items in the scope. However, please note that Bug 347502 talks of determining the title direction automatically, which I take to mean by looking at the title text. As indicated above, the correct thing to do is to follow the <title> element's directionality, i.e. as determined by the dir attribute of that element or an ancestor. If you mark this bug as duplicate of that one, please copy that and the reference there.