The notion of a bar has several uses and meanings. You can refer to a piece that is longer than thick; a roll of raw metal; an iron lever used to move something heavy; the counter of a business; the fans of a team or an athlete; the group of friends who meet regularly; or the graphic sign that, in writing, is used to separate.
Title, on the other hand, can be the word or phrase that identifies the name of a work; the recognition that is granted to a person for their knowledge, their ancestry or other particularity; the legal document that establishes an obligation or grants a right; or the trophy that is awarded for an achievement.
We can, with this panorama, focus on the concept of the title bar. It is a component of the graphical interface of a software that presents the identification of the application in use or similar information. The title bar, along with the toolbar and the taskbar, is part of what are known as menu bars.
This element of the graphical interface, which is also known as titlebar or title bar by its name in English, is found at the top of a window and displays a title that corresponds to the content of the window. Other buttons usually appear next to this horizontal bar, such as those that allow you to minimize, maximize or close the window.
For example: when loading a web page in the Mozilla Firefox browser, the title bar will display the title of the site (such as FIFA.com or the Official Site of the United Nations) next to the name of the software (Mozilla Firefox).
Given the changes that operating systems have undergone at the graphical and structural level in recent years, the title bar has ceased to be as important as in the past, since in the era of touch screens and mobile devices it is usually use a more symbolic than textual language; Today, for example, icons are more prominent than ever, and they are usually presented without any legend to explain what they refer to.
Taking the Chrome browser as an example, one of the most popular today, its design does not have a proper title bar: when you start it, you see a tab that presents the most visited sites and that gives the option to run the applications that the user has installed; looking at its upper limit, it is impossible to know what program it is if it has not been seen before, although on that first screen there is a Chrome logo located at the bottom of the window.
Once a user starts using Chrome to visit websites, there is no longer any indication of the name of the program in view, but it must be deduced exclusively by its design. However, each page does display its own title on the tab itself, something that all current browsers share. This speaks to us of an evolution that is supported by the phenomenon of the massification of computing: given that today many more people use computers and electronic devices than two decades ago, the learning curve is usually lower, so no longer it is so necessary to remember every second the name of an application.
In addition, given the experience of users, they have become more demanding than ever, and that also explains the importance of having a unique and striking design, easy to understand and with clear advantages over the competition. At the beginning of the 90’s, most of the applications were based on a similar design, which responded mainly to the possibilities of the operating system for which they had been developed, and for that reason the title bar was essential.
