Hi @SD0001, thanks for filing this! I'm moving this task for discussion.

With notifications the counter is reset whenever you open the notifications dropdown, or similar. When would the watchlist / recentchanges counter reset? With no reset it doesn't seem useful.

It would be reset when the document comes into focus – that is,

1. If the user is in another tab, it's reset when they switch to the watchlist tab
2. If the user is already on the watchlist tab, it's reset when they click somewhere on the page

I believe $(window).focus event captures both these scenarios.

A prototypical implementation is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SD0001/watchlist-update-title.js

@SD0001 -- thank you for filing this. I think it sounds like a good idea for an improvement. Our team is heads-down on our "add an image" work, and I don't think we can prioritize this idea in the near term. Since it would be a change that would affect many users, I'm tagging @Trizek-WMF -- could you comment on whether you've heard this idea or request discussed elsewhere? I would be interested to hear about whether it's been requested from multiple directions.

I remember a few disperse discussions about this, but I don't think it is a frequent request. It would be a nice to have, though.

I would advise to submit the idea to the upcoming Community Wishlist Survey, along with other real-time notifications, like T113125: Investigate using service workers to provide real-time Echo notifications in the browser (push notifications) for instance. This way, a cohesive design would be provided for a much better integration.