In Firefox and Google Chrome a tab can be pinned. A pinned tab shows just the favicon of the website and takes less space. This is a feature I regularly use for things like GMail, Asana and Twitter. When any of these applications receive an update, the tab will be highlighted when it is not currently active.

When we set up the Aphlict server, I expected such an awesome experience from Phabricator as well. I pinned Phabricator in my browser, turned off all emails and started to wait for the tab to highlight to alert me of a new diff. Sadly, it didn't highlight, and I didn't notice the new diff.

The implementation to get the tab to highlight should be relatively simple. All that is needed is a change in the tab's title. Both GMail and Twitter do this by inserting the number of new messages in the title element. Asana does it very nice by only adding a icon in front of the normal title.