A few months back we’ve reported Google will introduce Scroll to Text Fragment feature with a Chrome release, the related Chrome Platform Status page confirms the feature is enabled by default in Chrome 80 on desktop and Andriod, which is not half true. The Text Fragments feature will be available to some via finch experiment and isn’t available to everyone out of the box. The feature is part of Chrome 81 which will release on March 17, 2020. We now have a tool present in the form of a bookmarklet to avoid the manual need of generating URLs to highlight specified text in a web page.
Before knowing about the tool, here is a little brief about the Text Fragment Anchor which is also available in Chromium Edge non-release builds behind a flag.
“The feature allows a user or author to link to a specific portion of a page, using text snippet provided in the URL. When the page is loaded, the browser highlights the text and scrolls it into view”.
For instance, navigating to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#:~:text=Impact%20on%20birds in Chrome will directly highlight and takes you “impact on birds” section in Wikipedia for a page related to Cat. Depending on the Chrome version you’re using you may need to enable the “Enable Text Fragment Anchor” flag.
Google thinks the feature can be used by Search engines and Wikipedia reference links.
To enable users to more quickly find the content they’re interested in, we propose generalizing the existing support for scrolling to elements based on the fragment identifier. We believe this capability could be used by a variety of websites (e.g. search engine results pages, Wikipedia reference links), as well as by end users when sharing links from a browser.
Without any ado, here is how you can link to a particular piece of text on a web page: you need to append “#:~:text=” at the end of URL and need to add target Text. https://example.com/#:~:text=TargettedText
Scroll to Text Fragment Bookmarklet
Google Dev Rel lead Paul Kinlan created a simple bookmarklet for Scroll to Text Fragment. You need to just drag and drop it to the Chrome favorites bar, after that visit any page, select a piece of text and click on the bookmarklet where newly generated URL open in a new tab to share.
Thanks for sharing the Bookmarklet. Much appreciated.
You’re welcome.