Blue dot in a tab with active print dialog

I printed something in a Chrome tab, and switched to different tab without printing, having the print dialog still open, and noticed a blue dot:

I switched back to the tab, and the dot was gone. It is ordinary print form:

(contents redacted for security, it's not really blank, but also not changing.)

I am aware of Why do Chrome tabs have blue dots on them?, but unlike what the accepted answer there says, in my case title does not change, page contents are not changing, and the tab is not pinned.

What does the blue dot mean, in this case?

3 Answers

With the removal of the blue dot on "Pinned tab title change" merged on May 9 2019, the blue dot means that a dialog is open and requires attention.

You can also reproduce this behaviour with an alert box too.

(Update for 2019)

Looking at Chromium'ssource, this blue dot is called "alert indicator".

The conditions under which it was displayed in the past are:

• A dialog is active
• The tab contents have changed.

This option seems to have been partially lost, as indicated by the post How do I turn the blue dot on pinned tabs back on, and mainly works now for alerting about an active dialog.

The extensionBlue Dot Replacementis supposed to get back the old behavior, described as:

Show a flashing alert icon when an unfocused tab's title changes.

Older versions of Chrome would display a dot next to the icon of recently updated tabs, which many users found extremely helpful for web applications like Slack, Mattermost, etc. Unfortunately, this feature has since been dropped from Chrome.

ThisChromium announcementsays:

The chromium team is changing the animation for pinned tabs to a static image (blue dot) in the latest Chrome Dev update as the animation was too subtle and used to consume too many CPUs on some devices.

Source:

This is currently Chrome's way of signalling that something has changed on a pinned page.

Is your tab indeed pinned?